Rotating Color Ball ? What Is Happening ?

[Robert4]

Hello,

Running Sonoma on my mac desktop.

This started about a month ago.
I imagine it might be a popular topic.

When doing "normal" work and using
the internet, often now, that rotating colorful ball comes up
and I have to re-boot.

Not doing anything fancy; just seems random.

Can anyone suggest, please, what might be happening ?
What causes "generally" ?

**Or, what I can perhaps check out ?

HD going bad ?

Thanks, as always,
Bob

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Spinning "beach ball" is a common UI element. It's Mac basically saying it needs a little time to process/execute whatever you are asking it to do. It will commonly appear when you have too much stuff using too little RAM and/or are writing 1+ files to storage. I have a Mac with abundant RAM and an Ultra chip and I see it at times.

It may also be an attempt at hypnosis by Apple. If you record it doing this and then watch each frame in slow motion, you'll see that every 16th frame has a subliminal message that says "Buy More Apple Tech Today"

*just in case there is any confusion, one of those 2 paragraphs is a joke.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Can anyone suggest, please, what might be happening ?
What causes "generally" ?

**Or, what I can perhaps check out ?

HD going bad ?

Which Mac model do you have? Which app(s) are you using when you see this?

Are you able to switch to the Finder and then Apple Menu>Force Quit to see if the app says it's not responding? A force quit of the offending software at that point would be better than rebooting immediately.

In my case, this is a third-party software issue the vast majority of the time.

 

[Fishrrman]

What Mac?
What year was it made?
How much installed RAM?
How large is your hard drive?
What KIND of drive is it (platter-based HDD, fusion drive, SSD)?
Which apps are open?

Have you tried shutting down, and then rebooting?

Beachball usually indicates that something is "clogging up and slowing down" things.
Could be not enough RAM, hard drive too full (VM swapping impacted), CPU/GPU not capable of handling what is asked of it, too many apps open, one app slowing down and gumming things up...

 

[CarlLikesTech]

I have the same problem. Need to reboot twice a day. Started about a month ago. Running word, safari, goodnotes and the Complete Anatomy app on an M1 pro MBP. Does this mean I need to buy the new M4 pro MBP?

 

[Sciuriware]

I have the same problem. Need to reboot twice a day. Started about a month ago. Running word, safari, goodnotes and the Complete Anatomy app on an M1 pro MBP. Does this mean I need to buy the new M4 pro MBP?

I have ... see below, and this problem occurs only when my own programs go into a (long / infinite) loop.
;JOOP!

 

[Ruggy]

Do you ever clear out all your history?
Sometimes you can have something in there like a cookie or some bad script that it's trying to load and it can cause this.
It can be many things, extension, malware....

 

[DaveEcc]

Is your drive nearly full by any chance? Macs and iPhones slow to a crawl if the storage is nearly full. SSDs need some free space to work optimally. When free space gets really low, it becomes quite unusable.