Finder beachball hanging constantly

[Simon R.]

Hi.

Installed the Yosemite beta on a 2013 Macbook Air: In short - I am screwed. Almost all actions result in a beachball for 15-20 seconds. Deleting a file in finder, browsing the system preferences, opening a webpage etc. There seems to be a big problem going on in the system that affects almost all UI/GUI actions/whatever causes it.

I also notice that when the machine boots, it takes a long time to get the Airplay, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and battery icons up in the toolbar. I tried re-installing the whole OS, same thing happens. I also deleted all sorts of 3rd party software that might could cause this, but still no luck.

Any ideas?

 

[maflynn]

Did you try all the usual suspects, resetting pram/smc and fixing permissions?

 

[Simon R.]

Didnt try those before you suggested it. I did the first two now, still have the same problem unfortunately.

Repair/Verify disk permissions are greyed out. Don't know if they are supposed to be.

When booting up, only spotlight and notifications icons appear in the toolbar. And the machine is unresponsive, until after about 20 seconds the rest pop up. Can't go into spotlight before that either.

One odd thing... when I look under "Type" of drive in disk utility, it now says "Logical Volume Group" - not Mac OS Extended as it did under Mavericks. Don't know if that tells anything.

 

[yeldarbnamdlog]

Simon R. - If you can, try installing Yosemite on to a clean external drive, and see if the problem is fixed...My suspicion is that due to some conflicts, the upgrade didn't 'go well'.

Maflynn - The ability to repair permissions currently appears to either be disabled or broken in DP1, and I would NOT recommend booting from a Mavericks installer and using that to repair permissions...That is likely to make existing problems exponentially worse.

 

[maflynn]

Maflynn - The ability to repair permissions currently appears to either be disabled or broken in DP1, and I would NOT recommend booting from a Mavericks installer and using that to repair permissions...That is likely to make existing problems exponentially worse.

I'm on mavericks so I was unaware of such

I tried giving the easy stuff first but it doesn't appear to have helped.

 

[yeldarbnamdlog]

I tried giving the easy stuff first but it doesn't appear to have helped.

No worries...The easy stuff NEVER works in early builds...Do you remember the DP1 of Mavericks? Now THAT was a pain!

 

[man3ster]

Same

I too am having the same unresponsive problem with yosemite. My system is mid-2010 macbook pro. I understood what I was getting into with the DP. Sound is also a problem I am experiencing. Anyone else? Also my drive is encrypted with filevault. Im curious if that has anything to do with anything.

 

[PsykX]

Try this :
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1740460/

I can't say why, but it has fixed all the sluggish that I've had before. I couldn't even use the OS. Safari would hang all the time, System Preferences too, Finder same thing, Google Chrome and Firefox wouldn't work ...

 

[safllc]

Can't Repair Permissions and Mac Mail Crashes on Open

I, too, cannot use Yosemite Recovery Disk to repair permissions. Nor can it do a reinstall of Yosemite.

Mac Mail crashes every time I try to open it.

Finally, doing a Safe Startup hangs mid-way and never gets to a desktop.

 

[boardhead]

I have had this problem for a while now too. Delays of up to 30 seconds when I change applications or do certain operations. I have an iMac with 4GB of ram, but the memory pressure was low during all of these episodes. Finally, I fixed the problem by disabling spotlight with this command:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

The only downside for me is that I can no longer search in Mail. So when I need to do this I temporarily re-enable spotlight with this command:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

then disable it again.

I've been using this fix for a few days now and the beachball problem has virtually disappeared!

- Phil

Edit: I just installed the 10.10.3 system update, and have re-enabled spotlight and the problem seems to be fixed. It looks like this was a bug in 10.10.2. I know the slow-down didn't occur when I first upgraded to Yosemite, and looking back now I think it may have started around the 10.10.2 update. Nice to have that fixed!