Finder beach ball problems!

[JuIez]

Hey guys!

Since updating to El Capitan a few months ago (clean install) I'm getting a beach ball for around 10 seconds in finder. This occurs only once after booting the Mac. It could be a right klick on the desktop or just a klick in the finder menu bar.

I'm currently on the newest OS X 10.11.3 and no minor update solved this problem (on Yosemite it didn't happen!)


Would like to know whether one of you guys is having the same problem or has an idea to solve it.

Thanks

 

[JohnDS]

The first thing to do is to open Disk Utility and run First Aid to make sure you don't have disk directory corruption.

Second, when this happens, open Console to see what error messages are being spawned, or if you can anticipate it happening, open Console and watch the error messages live.

 

[fisherking]

it's only happening after booting up? how often do you reboot? (it's ok to sleep your mac, & just reboot periodically). sounds like a process is running, and needs to complete before the bootup is finished.


EDIT: good advice from JohnDS above, as well...

 

[Fishrrman]

Could you tell us a bit more about your Mac?

- Which Mac is it?
- What year was it made?
- Does it have a platter-based hard drive, or an SSD inside?

 

[Partron22]

What sort of network are you running?
Sometimes connection negotiations take a bit when a new machine wants to join.

 

[JuIez]

Thanks for the help!

First Aid didn’t find any directory corruption or mistakes but the console is sending the following messages while getting the beach ball:

20.02.16 17:33:30,000 kernel[0]: ignored is_io_service_close(0x100000419,IOHIDParamUserClient)

20.02.16 17:33:30,107 SubmitDiagInfo[353]: Couldn't load config file from on-disk location. Falling back to default location. Reason: Won't serialize in _readDictionaryFromJSONData due to nil object​

It’s only happening once per boot (but even occurs after a couple of minutes) and i am using a MacBook Pro 13“ MD101D/A (mid 2012) in combination with 8GB Ram and Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB and connected to an WiFi Network. The SSD was used under Yosemite as well without any problems.

 

[Partron22]

SubmitDiagInfo is trying to send information to Apple and apparently can't find the file.
I'm not finding el Cap specific fixes on the net, but here's one for Mavericks which may be helpful to yopu.

 

[JuIez]

SubmitDiagInfo is trying to send information to Apple and apparently can't find the file.
I'm not finding el Cap specific fixes on the net, but here's one for Mavericks which may be helpful to yopu.

Nope, didn't work

 

[fisherking]

seriously, how often do you reboot? am not saying the issue isn't valid, but, once it finishes whatever it's doing...you're good right? so: how often are you rebooting?

 

[NoBoMac]

I'm going with fisherking re: startup items at boot. On my 2008 MBP with SSD, it's Beachballville at startup. I startup as hidden Mesages, Mail, Safari, Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, iTunes, Feedly. Add in Dropbox syncing items, as well as iCloud, pretty unresponsive early on.

 

[IowaLynn]

Etrecheck? Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive have all affected system responsiveness.

 

[Dorothy Gale]

I have ran into exactly the same issue on my end. It's really annoying albeit I guess it, quite benign. Anyhow, precautions and directions should be in place, so even if you only boot up the Mac once per day, the 10-second flat beach balling is one too many.

• Starting up in safe mode didn't solve it for me.
• Neither did deleting Finder preferences.
• Isolating the Mac from the (wired) Network… nada.

This occurs only once after booting the Mac. It could be a right klick on the desktop or just a klick in the finder menu bar.

Do you mean the whole OS X menu bar or maybe ONLY the "File" item in the menu bar? On my Mac, the issue shows up when clicking on the "File" menu, so my suspicions were toward Finder tags as I am a heavy user of those. So far Edit, View, Go, Window… those don't trigger the beachball. Just "File" does.

So, upon this, I short-listed the suspects, namely:

1. FindePop (residuals) I had FinderPop installed on Yosemite. And it's known to be incompatible with El Capitan so it is longer gone. So after running EasyFind I stumbled upon and deleted remaining files associated with FinderPop. While this didn't do the trick, I won something like 100 KB on HD space.
2. MailTags, (Mail Plug-in) Remember when I wrote I was a heavy tags user? Well, this is it. Besides adding tags and a helluva of Finder/Spotlight comments to most files I "own," I do the same with e-mails. So it occurred to me that maybe it was too much for the Finder to deal with. So with the help of the Mail Plugin Manager app, I disabled the Mail plug-ins I had running on my Mac, (Mail Tags and Send It Later) but alas, this didn't help either. In all honest, I should clarify that I thought deactivating these was the key to solve the issue as the beach-balling on start-up/restart did show up again… until today. So there it goes what I had foresaw as my savior.

Also, quite interesting fact: if I go to Menu > About this Mac…

Overview, Display, Memory… those panes respond to a mouse click promptly, BUT, Storage? the 1st time you click on it, it takes 10 seconds (geez, how coincident can get it!) to the pane to react. I should point out that there is a Boot Camp partition with Windows 10. And that the burner is kind of present there, as it is on the Apple menu and the contextual menu… however I fail to see the burner leading to this no matter how much it's been depreciated by Apple.

Mac-specs:
MacBook Pro 17" Late 2011
2.4 i7 quad-core
16B RAM
750GB 54000rpm hard disk which has been glacially slow since day one, no issues being reported by Disk Utility.
GPU: AMD Radeon 1 GB and intel 3000 512MB

I'm using an external Apple wired keyboard and a Magic Mouse. The beach-ball issue came before to having attached the keyboard.

Login Items:

• gfxCardStatus
• iTunes Helper
• SMARTReporter
• NoteBookHelper (Circus Ponies NoteBook; I know it's dead, but there's no way I am parting ways with it.)
• SpeechSynthesisServer

Array of misc. settings I can think of:
Recent Items… set to none
Put hard disk to sleep when possible… never
Wake for network access… unchecked
Send diagnostics and usage data to Apple… never
Share crash data with developers… never
FileVault is turned off.
Firewall is turned off.
Spotlight search is kinda slow and somewhat erratic. Allow Spotlight suggestions… never.

Items listed in Today (Notification Center)
Battery Monitor
Calendar
Weather

Extensions for Share Menu:
AirDrop
PhotoSync
Mail
Messages

System Preferences > Sharing
everything is OFF

App Store settings
Automatically check - download… OFF

Printers:
HP 2100TN (network printer)
Canon Pixma Pro9000 (USB printer)
None attached to the Mac right now.

I only have one 3rd party Preference pane inside System Preferences, and that is (don't you dare laugh at this) Quark Update.

That's all I can think of right now… more to come.

 

[Dorothy Gale]

Bit of Addendum:

I have installed Orbicule's Undercover (anti-theft software) albeit the beach-ball issue doesn't present itself in two other Macs running El Capitan and Undercover.

As for cloud services… I only use SpiderOakONE, but it's not set as log-in item either.

@JuIez:

• Do you have any of the aforementioned software or login items installed onto your Mac?
• What about the settings?
• Does the 10 seconds unresponsiveness happen if you go to Menu > About this Mac > Storage ???

Hoping we could cross-check any underlying evidence here.

 

[Dorothy Gale]

All right, so this is what Console reads upon click on Menu > About this Mac > Storage which also triggers the delay.

kernel[0]: SerialATAPI device reconfiguration did not complete successfully. (failedCommandInfo = 0x1)

Can anyone shed some light on why that might be happening?

 

[JuIez]

Bit of Addendum:

I have installed Orbicule's Undercover (anti-theft software) albeit the beach-ball issue doesn't present itself in two other Macs running El Capitan and Undercover.

As for cloud services… I only use SpiderOakONE, but it's not set as log-in item either.

@JuIez:

• Do you have any of the aforementioned software or login items installed onto your Mac?
• What about the settings?
• Does the 10 seconds unresponsiveness happen if you go to Menu > About this Mac > Storage ???

Hoping we could cross-check any underlying evidence here.

WOW, you're really digging into it. my only login items are ituneshelper and f.lux. And indeed, I get the same delay while clicking on storage. Very strange but interesting that it seems as if we got exactly the same problem. Etrecheck didn't find anything odd though

 

[Dorothy Gale]

f.lux I had, but t's long gone and there are no remaining files left, so I wouldn't suspect on it.
Etrecheck didn't find anything wrong here either.

What I am pondering now is if the health check listed below might've something to do with the beach-ball issue. Right now I can't provide you with an evidence base for this thinking, but will keep an eye on it.

mds[64]: (DiskStore.Normal:1705) Starting health check...

 

[JuIez]

f.lux I had, but t's long gone and there are no remaining files left, so I wouldn't suspect on it.
Etrecheck didn't find anything wrong here either.

What I am pondering now is if the health check listed below might've something to do with the beach-ball issue. Right now I can't provide you with an evidence base for this thinking, but will keep an eye on it.

mds[64]: (DiskStore.Normal:1705) Starting health check...

I couldn't find anything related to that neither. So for now I stopped booting the mac as frequently as I did before to prevent the error and just put it into sleep mode over night (doing a full shut down maybe once or twice a week)

 

[Dorothy Gale]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I appreciate it.

Well, I usually boot up the Mac and, given the slowness of the 5400rpm hard disk, I get back to it later, could be one-half an hour or one hour later. Now, taking a look at Console I see health check is long done and no beachball is triggered by control-clic on file/folder nor clic on Apple's Menu "File" item.

What still does trigger the beach-balling, one hour later, is the step described by comment #14, click on Menu > About this Mac > Storage, up to the point that I get the very same read in Console:

kernel[0]: SerialATAPI device reconfiguration did not complete successfully. (failedCommandInfo = 0x1)

I am still pondering if this could be related to the Boot Camp partition? Do you happen to have Boot Camp installed?

 

[Partron22]

Got a micro SD adapter? link

 

[Dorothy Gale]

Thanks Partron22. No micro SD adapter here, though.

 

[Dorothy Gale]

Well, I think this comes down to some kind of misconfiguration which is far from my knowledge. Today, I booted-up the Mac at 8:36 AM and I went back more than one hour later. Even so, I was able to trigger the beach-ball just by clicking on Apple's menu "File" item and, once that beachball lapse ended, I did trigger it again by clicking on About this Mac > Storage.

In both cases, Console's output was the same.

2/29/16 9:42:19.000 AM kernel[0]: SerialATAPI device reconfiguration did not complete successfully. (failedCommandInfo = 0x1)
2/29/16 9:42:45.000 AM kernel[0]: SerialATAPI device reconfiguration did not complete successfully. (failedCommandInfo = 0x1)


Time to submit it to Apple, I think!

 

[Partron22]

System Preferences - Energy Saver, uncheck "put discs to sleep when possible"
Perhaps this?: This procedure will delete certain temporary and cache files.
You've got something funny going on, and I'd be shocked if Apple solved it for you.

You know, when I run Linux (rather than Boot Camp/Windows), I run it off a separate drive rather than a separate partition. My Mac did not like having that oddly formatted stuff on the same physical disk as HFS+, or whatever they call it now days.

 

[Dorothy Gale]

Having just one internal hard disk, I don't activate the option to put the disk to sleep; it's already slow enough as is.

Now that I come to think about it… running Windows 10 thru Boot Camp is not supported by Apple on my Mac (MacBook Pro Late 2011… geez, how came that?) so I am running it with Boot Camp Support Software 5.1.5621 instead of latest Boot Camp. Should I give Boot Camp Support Software (6, I think) a try just to see if that fixes the issue? Everything works fine on the Windows side of it, though.

And should that be of help, who knows really, how am I supposed to download the latest Boot Camp Support Software available? I suspect Boot Camp Assistant is smart enough to know that this particular Mac shouldn't be running W10 at all.

On a side note, I used to have a Mac Pro 1,1 which ran on separate drives, Yosemite (unsupported) and Win7 64-bit (unsupported) albeit I am not willing to go that route with the MBP.

 

[VanNess]

Hey guys!

Since updating to El Capitan a few months ago (clean install) I'm getting a beach ball for around 10 seconds in finder. This occurs only once after booting the Mac. It could be a right klick on the desktop or just a klick in the finder menu bar.

I'm currently on the newest OS X 10.11.3 and no minor update solved this problem (on Yosemite it didn't happen!)


Would like to know whether one of you guys is having the same problem or has an idea to solve it.

Thanks

[doublepost=1456874995][/doublepost]You might try disabling iCloud Drive and see if that works. I had an issue with the desktop/finder taking forever to load with Yosemite after a reboot and disabling iCloud Drive solved it. Kept it off since then and everything has been fine up to the current version of El Cap

 

[JuIez]

System Preferences - Energy Saver, uncheck "put discs to sleep when possible"
Perhaps this?: This procedure will delete certain temporary and cache files.
You've got something funny going on, and I'd be shocked if Apple solved it for you.

You know, when I run Linux (rather than Boot Camp/Windows), I run it off a separate drive rather than a separate partition. My Mac did not like having that oddly formatted stuff on the same physical disk as HFS+, or whatever they call it now days.

Thanks, but it didn't help unfortunately. Furthermore, I don't use a micro sd card adapter, boot camp or icloud drive. Also submitted this problem to Apple. Let's see what we get!