What's causing my system to hang?

[croshtique]

This is an annoying problem which seems to have kicked in for me a couple of weeks ago.

Whilst torrent applications have been running and downloading, sometimes I'll see the d/l and u/l speeds creep down to 0, with plenty of seeds and after running perfectly fine for a while. Then I'll notice the time in the menubar has 'frozen'; moving my mouse over the menubar gives a spinning beachball, thus I suspect WindowServer or SystemUIServer has hung. However, I can't check this is the case because by this point any applications I attempt to open (e.g. Activity Monitor) just bouce for ever in the dock and don't open. It affects my network connections too; Adium will sign me out and attempting a URL visit in Safari will do nothing.

It only seems to occur whilst I'm running BitTorrent applications and have had it happen with Azureus, Transmission, TomatoTorrent and the official client.

It's an iBook G4 running 10.4.9, and any help/suggestions would be welcome...

 

[MacsRgr8]

Tough to find out on the Mac which has the problem itself...

Any chance of setting up "Remote Login" (SSH) on the troublesome Mac, and let a another Mac connect to it, and try to analyze the problem remotely?
i.e. use "top", "tail -f /var/log/system.log".

 

[Angrist]

My PowerMac does a very similar thing.
I haven't been able to pin down the problem yet.
But when it happens I have to hard restart, which causes problems with the filesystem. Sometimes resulting in a system that won't boot or even see the installed HDs.

I suspect that the problem is with my ACARD IDE controller card ... I've swapped HDs and PCI slots.

In your case ... maybe the HD is going bad and the torrent writing process is causing something to get confused.

 

[croshtique]

My PowerMac does a very similar thing.
I haven't been able to pin down the problem yet.
But when it happens I have to hard restart, which causes problems with the filesystem. Sometimes resulting in a system that won't boot or even see the installed HDs.

A hard restart is the only thing that fixes it for me too. I thought as I know the time the problem happens (the UIServer appears to hang, freezing the menubar including the clock) I'd check through the console logs (even though I don't know much about them).

Seems as though the last thing logged in the system.log before all these crashes was a process by TVShows, an app I had running in the background to check and download torrent files every hour for new TV eps. Having run the uninstall script I've had no problems for the last 3 hours of so (for the 3 hours before that I had at least 2 instances of that crash). Will see if this cures the problem!

 

[NoLoginUser]

Same problem after Mojave update. Did you find the problem and resolve?

 

[satcomer]

Same problem after Mojave update. Did you find the problem and resolve?

Did you open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app to see if something is running away in your Mac!

 

[NoLoginUser]

Did you open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app to see if something is running away in your Mac!

nothing unusual

It seems about once a day the system will beach ball needing a restart. The first symptom is that web pages don't load and then when I move the cursor over the wireless symbol in the taskbar the system beach balls.

Activity Monitor shows SystemUIServer not responding. Force quitting closes it but doesn't fix the problem and I need to restart.

This user accurately describes the essence of my problem. Absolutely the same symptoms. And nobody can resolve it.

I can't wait for the next update with the hope that the apple will fix this