Browser fail and Mac has to be hard rebooted

[ad1815]

I run 10.8.2 and this problem has annoyed me for a long time. Once in a while (sometimes after one day, sometimes after several day), my browser cannot access any website, or becomes unresponsive, then I cannot quite the browser, mail or any other application. And I cannot start console. Sometimes I can reach
the reboot menu, sometimes not, but the menu does not work. So I have to hold the power button to shutdown the computer.

It has happened when I used Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Has anyone seen the same problem?

 

[justperry]

You should look if you have kernel panic logs, if so look inside what they say, if you don't know what to look for report one of them here.
Might be a GPU problem or a GPU bug inside the OS.

You could also run Apple Hardware Test.

Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

 

[ad1815]

Mac does not crash when this problem happens - it does not shut down applications and shut down the OS.

 

[ad1815]

I ran hardware test just now. Nothing was found wrong.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

What version of os x exactly?

 

[vistadude]

He said 10.8.2. It sounds like a hardware failure, you just happen to be browsing most of the time on your computer.

What version of os x exactly?

 

[SlCKB0Y]

He said 10.8.2. It sounds like a hardware failure, you just happen to be browsing most of the time on your computer.

Woops, I was using tapatalk on my phone and didn't see that bit. Yep, vistadude might well be right, try and reproduce the crash when you aren't using a browser.

Otherwise it could also be something which all those browsers have in common.. like a plugin.

 

[ad1815]

There is really no way to reproduce it - it does not happen regularly enough that I can see a pattern, but it happens often enough to annoy me.

If it is related to a browser plugin, I should be able to kill the browser. But several times I still have an active console and try to kill the browser or gracefully shutdown the computer, but even that does not work. I suspect it is related to the GCD (grand central dispatcher).

I am glad that nobody else has seen this problem.

 

[ZVH]

It could be marginally bad sectors on your drive. Nearly all applications use shared libraries, which are typically read once on demand, loaded into memory, and then used, often by multiple applications. Shared libraries save memory resources because instead of having all applications load the same code over and over again, they load it once and read it directly from memory. It would make sense if they're all web browsers because it's likely they'd use some of the same shared network libraries.

Here's a link to drive tools available if you're interested:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/280022/

We use Scannerz because it can detect failed sectors, marginally failing sectors, and some hardware problems. Marginally failing sectors can be read OK one time and then be completely corrupt the next. If you get errors and or irregularities with it that aren't repeatable, then it's either a bad cable or (gasp!) a problem with the logic board.

Before buying any tool you might want to do a web search and see if others are reporting the same problem. I surely wouldn't rule out a bug in Mountain Lion (see some of my other posts.)

As an FYI, in my opinion, Apple hardware test is almost useless.

Good luck.

 

[TheBSDGuy]

ZVH, Scannerz is a great tool, but take my word for it, if you're using ML, you can almost COUNT on the problems being the OS. For the love of God, TextEdit crashed on me tonight!!!!!!! YOU HEARD ME, TextEdit!!!

I and others have experienced bizarre behavior w/ML and Safari. For example, I open up Mail, check Weather.com for the weather, leave the system alone, and come back to find the system locked up. I check Activity Monitor and 100% of the memory is pegged between mds, Safari Web Content, and kernel_task.

This is a buggy operating system. I haven't seen an operating system this bad in decades!