Beachballs again...

[ndaisley]

Hi there,
I'm new to the forums but have had a good look around here and elsewhere to find answers.

As of about three days ago, I have had major speed issues; any finder action, whether open a finder window, close a finder window, scroll up and down in a window etc, right-click for a contextual menu, is greeted with about 10 - 20 seconds of beach-ball spinning.

Console and logs give no clues. I have fixed disk permissions, rebooted several times, cleared system and other caches, made the system rebuild its DS_store, and the disks (there are two) check out fine with Disk Utility and are S.M.A.R.T verified. No new software was installed at or around the time when things went bad.

This is a B&W G3 400, with 768mb.
My thought is either:
- Finder is broken in some way.
- There is a physical problem with the disk controller.
- Conceivably a virus? Sophos cannot find one.

Whatever it is, I'm making lots of backups right now in anticipation of disaster... Would very much appreciate any ideas, thank you!

 

[mad jew]

Backing up is a good idea, these tests don't always find failing hard drives. Now, check Activity Monitor to see if it's a single process using all your resources.

 

[ndaisley]

Thanks for that - must admit that I had not checked that. There was no process that was visibly hogging either CPU or memory, and although Finder jumps briefly in priority when I open a window, it does not stay high.

However, you may have pointed me to the answer - I killed 'mount_nfs' (I have no NFS shares and don't need any - where did this come from??) and things seem to have radically improved!

This was not running at a high priority according to the 'top' listing, but perhaps the process (which must have been running since I got hold of this machine second-hand a long time ago) has gone bad, or something.