Fleeting Spinning Wheel on M1 64gb Ram Macbook

[DCooper7]

Hi guys,

Just some advice please.

Brand new Macbook Pro, M1 Max, 64gb Ram, with a 4tb hard drive, and I'm running the latest OS Catalina 10 15. 7.
I was using Final Cut Pro and Safari today and I noticed the spinning wheel when editing audio in FCP and when switching tabs in Safari.

However, every time the wheel popped up it only stayed for like a second or two. But it popped up often.

Please can I get your opinions....
I'm new to Mac so I don't know if this is normal behaviour or not?

Thank you.

 

[Technerd108]

Catalina on M1 Max? Maybe you mean 12.15.7?

Just because you have the highest spec MBP doesn't mean that you won't see the spinning beach ball. I have M1 Max with 32gb ram and while it is very fast there are times doing something intensive I see the beach ball but usually it is only for a few seconds as you noted.

It seems that you were at least mildly using the cpu/gpu with Final Cut Pro and Safari.

I wouldn't worry about it unless you see it for a long time.

 

[DCooper7]

Hi,
Thank you so much for the prompt reply. I really appreciate that. Sorry about the OS mistake...
Evrery article I read about the spinning beach ball was saying that it was a serious problem.
Your the first person who has written that it can appear as part of the intensive process when it shows for a short time.
Thanks again.

 

[generationfourth]

How new? out of the box and it's still indexing and doing other things in the background? are you looking at the activity monitor?

 

[Technerd108]

Hi,
Thank you so much for the prompt reply. I really appreciate that. Sorry about the OS mistake...
Evrery article I read about the spinning beach ball was saying that it was a serious problem.
Your the first person who has written that it can appear as part of the intensive process when it shows for a short time.
Thanks again.

No problem. Why don't you test it a bit. Do a bunch of intensive apps and open a bunch or tabs on safari and see what happens.

I am pretty sure it is normal behavior. Who told you that seeing a spinning beach ball is a serious problem? It is a much more rare occurrence and usually a quick one on newer Mac's but it does happen on all Mac's at one time or another.

Also if you feel something might be an issue I would recommend you call Apple and have them run diagnostic on your computer and ask for some advice on what is happening with your machine. You paid a lot of money for your device based on the configuration you might as wellmtry Apple's customer support. Asking people on a forum you are going to get a bunch of conflicting information. It is best to ask Apple when truly in doubt.

I always do a fresh install on my Mac as well. I will go into the restore my Mac and wipe the drive completely and reinstall MacOS. Be sure to wipe your drive not just reinstall the OS if you try and watch a YouTube video on the process so you can see how it works if you are new to macs. Don't just try it because you could get stuck. Also backup everything to icloud first. It is good to know how to do this process if you ever have a problem. Just an idea.

Enjoy your awesome MBP!

 

[mr_roboto]

Hi,
Thank you so much for the prompt reply. I really appreciate that. Sorry about the OS mistake...
Evrery article I read about the spinning beach ball was saying that it was a serious problem.
Your the first person who has written that it can appear as part of the intensive process when it shows for a short time.
Thanks again.

For more detail about why the spinning beachball isn't necessarily a serious problem, you need to understand what decides to show it and in what context.

macOS has a special system process named WindowServer. It does many things. It's responsible for putting window contents on screen (said content is provided by apps in offscreen pixel buffers) and drawing the mouse cursor. It's also responsible for dispatching user generated events (mouse clicks, keypresses, scroll events, etc) to the process owning the window those events were directed at. Usually that's the foreground window, but not always.

If an application stops responding to WindowServer's event notifications for a significant period of time, WindowServer will replace the normal mouse cursor with the spinning beach ball graphic while the mouse is over that app's windows or menu bar. This is done to give you some kind of feedback that this particular app isn't really responding to your clicks at the moment.

There's a ton of reasons why this can happen. For example, apps use one thread to respond to these events, and if the app ever does a lot of computation on that thread, it's at risk of triggering the beachball. Best practice in Mac app design is to push all potentially long-running compute jobs out to other threads, but sometimes programmers think "oh this little thing could never take long so it'll be OK" and then their app hits a real-world case where their assumptions weren't true.

 

[satcomer]

Hi guys,

Just some advice please.

Brand new Macbook Pro, M1 Max, 64gb Ram, with a 4tb hard drive, and I'm running the latest OS Catalina 10 15. 7.
I was using Final Cut Pro and Safari today and I noticed the spinning wheel when editing audio in FCP and when switching tabs in Safari.

However, every time the wheel popped up it only stayed for like a second or two. But it popped up often.

Please can I get your opinions....
I'm new to Mac so I don't know if this is normal behaviour or not?

Thank you.

Yep, bad old Intel programming! Blame the developer that abound his/her creation!

 

[DCooper7]

For more detail about why the spinning beachball isn't necessarily a serious problem, you need to understand what decides to show it and in what context.

macOS has a special system process named WindowServer. It does many things. It's responsible for putting window contents on screen (said content is provided by apps in offscreen pixel buffers) and drawing the mouse cursor. It's also responsible for dispatching user generated events (mouse clicks, keypresses, scroll events, etc) to the process owning the window those events were directed at. Usually that's the foreground window, but not always.

If an application stops responding to WindowServer's event notifications for a significant period of time, WindowServer will replace the normal mouse cursor with the spinning beach ball graphic while the mouse is over that app's windows or menu bar. This is done to give you some kind of feedback that this particular app isn't really responding to your clicks at the moment.

There's a ton of reasons why this can happen. For example, apps use one thread to respond to these events, and if the app ever does a lot of computation on that thread, it's at risk of triggering the beachball. Best practice in Mac app design is to push all potentially long-running compute jobs out to other threads, but sometimes programmers think "oh this little thing could never take long so it'll be OK" and then their app hits a real-world case where their assumptions weren't true.

Thank you for this information. Much appreciated.

 

[DCooper7]

How new? out of the box and it's still indexing and doing other things in the background? are you looking at the activity monitor?

Thank you.
It's just over a month old. I am looking at the monitor but I'm not entirely sure what to look for apart from percentages.

 

[DCooper7]

No problem. Why don't you test it a bit. Do a bunch of intensive apps and open a bunch or tabs on safari and see what happens.

I am pretty sure it is normal behavior. Who told you that seeing a spinning beach ball is a serious problem? It is a much more rare occurrence and usually a quick one on newer Mac's but it does happen on all Mac's at one time or another.

Also if you feel something might be an issue I would recommend you call Apple and have them run diagnostic on your computer and ask for some advice on what is happening with your machine. You paid a lot of money for your device based on the configuration you might as wellmtry Apple's customer support. Asking people on a forum you are going to get a bunch of conflicting information. It is best to ask Apple when truly in doubt.

I always do a fresh install on my Mac as well. I will go into the restore my Mac and wipe the drive completely and reinstall MacOS. Be sure to wipe your drive not just reinstall the OS if you try and watch a YouTube video on the process so you can see how it works if you are new to macs. Don't just try it because you could get stuck. Also backup everything to icloud first. It is good to know how to do this process if you ever have a problem. Just an idea.

Enjoy your awesome MBP!

Thank you.

In fairness it only happened for a period of time in the afternoon. I force quit Safari and restarted it and it didn't occur again. I tested it with lots of tabs open and it didn't happen. It was weird as there wasn't that many tabs open with the beach ball was occurring.
With FCP, I forgot to import the wav file from the SD card and I was wondering from that. Perhaps that caused the beach ball in Final Cut? But the weird thing was that after I imported the file and ejected the card I still had the problem with Safari. It only happened a number of times for a literal second though...

If it starts happening again I will contact Apple Support.

I know that reinstalling MacOs can help with issues... When would you suggest reinstalling MacOs? If it gets really bad?

Thanks again!

 

[Technerd108]

It is probably a tab in safari using up a bunch of resources. I don't think FCP would tax your machine very much. Probably just a fluke and maybe you won't have it happen again.

The beach ball can happen. I wouldn't worry too much about it unless it happens often and for a long period of time like more than 30 seconds unless you know your taxing the machine. These MBP have to be doing a lot to tax them though or even get the fans to spin.

I was suggesting a re-install if it is an issue that is persistent and you can't figure out any reason for it. Also for educational purposes as learning how to do it on a new machine when you don't have much data on the device will make things a lot easier than when you have half your ssd filled up. But only do it if you are comfortable. I always do as soon as I get a new Mac or every year or so. It is probably not needed or recommended and Apple support can help guide you too. I like to know how things work. Unless you want to do it to learn or if you already have a lot on your Mac then I wouldn't do it until you have tried every other troubleshooting method first and most importantly have backed up your data.

First rule in computing when you have an issue is reboot the machine. Solves a lot of problems a lot of times. Lol.

Enjoy your new Mac and don't worry about it. If you look for an issue you will find one but these M1 Mac's are pretty reliable machines for the most part. Software can always have it's quirks but your Mac should be able to handle a lot without breaking a sweat most of the time.

 

[DCooper7]

It is probably a tab in safari using up a bunch of resources. I don't think FCP would tax your machine very much. Probably just a fluke and maybe you won't have it happen again.

The beach ball can happen. I wouldn't worry too much about it unless it happens often and for a long period of time like more than 30 seconds unless you know your taxing the machine. These MBP have to be doing a lot to tax them though or even get the fans to spin.

I was suggesting a re-install if it is an issue that is persistent and you can't figure out any reason for it. Also for educational purposes as learning how to do it on a new machine when you don't have much data on the device will make things a lot easier than when you have half your ssd filled up. But only do it if you are comfortable. I always do as soon as I get a new Mac or every year or so. It is probably not needed or recommended and Apple support can help guide you too. I like to know how things work. Unless you want to do it to learn or if you already have a lot on your Mac then I wouldn't do it until you have tried every other troubleshooting method first and most importantly have backed up your data.

First rule in computing when you have an issue is reboot the machine. Solves a lot of problems a lot of times. Lol.

Enjoy your new Mac and don't worry about it. If you look for an issue you will find one but these M1 Mac's are pretty reliable machines for the most part. Software can always have it's quirks but your Mac should be able to handle a lot without breaking a sweat most of the time.

Thanks again for your help.
I'm a photographer so if I do a reinstall there's going to be a lot of photos that I will need to transfer to external hard drives. So I would only do a reinstall if things get really bad. But I'm certainly not at that stage at the moment. I'm quite good at testing for issues before doing anything like a reinstall...
Like you said, if you look for issues you will find them. I have a habit of being a bit OCD when it comes to technology. Hopefully I won't have any issues going forward..
Anyway, thank you and have a great day.

 

[xraydoc]

Thanks again for your help.
I'm a photographer so if I do a reinstall there's going to be a lot of photos that I will need to transfer to external hard drives. So I would only do a reinstall if things get really bad. But I'm certainly not at that stage at the moment. I'm quite good at testing for issues before doing anything like a reinstall...
Like you said, if you look for issues you will find them. I have a habit of being a bit OCD when it comes to technology. Hopefully I won't have any issues going forward..
Anyway, thank you and have a great day.

If it's only coming up for a second, I would not worry in the slightest. There's no point in calling Apple support if it simply flashes a beachball for a moment then goes away. It's basically like the Windows hourglass pointer popping on momentarily... something is still happening in the background but not locking up the system. You said it happened when using USB storage -- likely the device was slow to report back to the OS, so the beachball came up until the device reported back.

In my unprofessional opinion, unless it comes up and your app goes unresponsive for extended periods of time, it's not anything to worry about.

 

[DCooper7]

If it's only coming up for a second, I would not worry in the slightest. There's no point in calling Apple support if it simply flashes a beachball for a moment then goes away. It's basically like the Windows hourglass pointer popping on momentarily... something is still happening in the background but not locking up the system. You said it happened when using USB storage -- likely the device was slow to report back to the OS, so the beachball came up until the device reported back.

In my unprofessional opinion, unless it comes up and your app goes unresponsive for extended periods of time, it's not anything to worry about.

Thank you so much for your advice. I really appreciate it.