The G5 has been crashing a lot lately; I complained about Adium being unstable, well it got to the point where I had to move back to an older build of the Alpha. Granted that we are talking about an alpha build of an application and the fact that it can run 24/7 normally without problems is pretty impressive.
Yesterday the number of errors grew significantly, and that's what forced me to migrate back to an older build of the client (2/9/04). I'm going to stick with this one until there's truly a compelling feature that'll make me want to upgrade. That's what i get for being a little too eager :)
An application that has historically never crashed for me was Unison - my newsgroup reader. I was browsing through some newsgroups yesterday (I got my start on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) and the application just kept on crashing. I would quit and restart Unison and it would still crash. The rest of the OS remained untouched but it was having some serious issues.
Then today, I was doing some work and I went to go click on something on my secondary display and poof, my mouse pointer disappeared. I could see the mouse pointer on the primary display, but no mouse pointer on the secondary display. The mouse was actually making it over to the secondary display as I could still click on things and move windows around, but the pointer had vanished. I tried not rebooting to save my life but in the end, I had to shut everything down and reboot.
When the mouse problem happened I had around 2GB of stuff in memory, so I've got no earthly clue what caused it. I wasn't doing anything too strenuous at that particular moment, and closing all the applications individually didn't rectify the situation so I'm not really sure what caused it.
I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but I'm going to be keeping a careful watch on the system and I'll report any findings I have. Has anyone here encountered similar problems?
Yesterday the number of errors grew significantly, and that's what forced me to migrate back to an older build of the client (2/9/04). I'm going to stick with this one until there's truly a compelling feature that'll make me want to upgrade. That's what i get for being a little too eager :)
An application that has historically never crashed for me was Unison - my newsgroup reader. I was browsing through some newsgroups yesterday (I got my start on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) and the application just kept on crashing. I would quit and restart Unison and it would still crash. The rest of the OS remained untouched but it was having some serious issues.
Then today, I was doing some work and I went to go click on something on my secondary display and poof, my mouse pointer disappeared. I could see the mouse pointer on the primary display, but no mouse pointer on the secondary display. The mouse was actually making it over to the secondary display as I could still click on things and move windows around, but the pointer had vanished. I tried not rebooting to save my life but in the end, I had to shut everything down and reboot.
When the mouse problem happened I had around 2GB of stuff in memory, so I've got no earthly clue what caused it. I wasn't doing anything too strenuous at that particular moment, and closing all the applications individually didn't rectify the situation so I'm not really sure what caused it.
I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but I'm going to be keeping a careful watch on the system and I'll report any findings I have. Has anyone here encountered similar problems?
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Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Some of the advice here is just terrible.1) Repairing disk permissions is a placebo. I know there are people that swear by it, and they always chime in to threads like this. But that's not the problem. If only it were that simple.
2) You don't need to reboot. What might be of help is to know what your usage patterns are like. Mac OS X runs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance logs at 6:30 pm (daily), 4:30 am (weekly) and 5:30 am (monthly). Do you have your computer on at this time? If not, those weekly and monthly logs may not be running. They are called by the cron daemon and are listed in /etc/crontab. You can deal with this maintenance script-not-executing issue by executing the scripts yourself as Damien has pointed out, or by setting up anacron to run these tasks appropriately. Anacron is like cron, except it handles downtime nicely. With all this said, I don't think doing this maintenance would have prevented the problems you've outlined.
3) Adium and Unison are quite immature. Unfortunately an OS can only do so much to offer stability. There's no nice way to address this problem except to wait for those two programs to mature.
4) You shouldn't have to logout and back in. That might lessen the effects of a problem, but it's not a fix. It's a behavioral adjustment to work around the problem. The ONLY exception to this rule is with FileVault-enabled, in which case logging out is a feature (once logged-out, the home directory becomes a simple encrypted sparse image).
5) Avoid Mac OS X system utilities like the plague. OS X does not need 95% of these utility programs. It can run just fine without them and in fact, using them can just introduce complexity and something extra to go wrong.
6) Your mouse issue is probably a graphics driver glitch. I wouldn't bet on it being fixed in 10.3.3, but there will be new drivers in that release of OS X. So it might just be addressed and fixed then. Apple has a website at http://bugreport.apple.com that you can use to fill out a detailed bug report.
B Rich - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I'd also recommend investing in DiskWarrior 3.01...a preventive maintenance app that will rebuild a pristine OS directory (not a patch). Many savvy Mac users swear by DiskWarrior (alsoft.com) to help keep their Mac humming along. Repairing permissions in Disk Utility can't hurt and trashing specific app preferences may be a good move as well.Terry Thiel - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Run the utility Cocktail which clears caches, does prebinding, and repairs permissions all in one go the reboot.http://www.macosxcocktail.com/
Adam K - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Yeah Anand, it is pretty hard to directly diagnose your problem.Of course, we are assuming that you have rebooted (the usual fix).
Do you think that the Adium client is causing the problem? Have you tried unistalling it?
Ray - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Wait is your G5 crashing (OS X freezing or what ever you want to call it) Or is it just the mouse pointer issue and those other Apps?Seth - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Hrm.. I've had that mouse problem before too (with my dual monitors). If I remember it disappeared before my upgrade to 10.3. I figured it was just a bug that got squashed somewhere, but I guess not. All that is required is a logout/login, but ya, it is rather frustrating.My current "odd problem" is icons being switched and some times corrupted. Another harmless bug that goes away at restart. Loose one problem, gain another. Maybe my system is just trying to tell me that 3+ weeks of heavy use is too many between restarts.
mugwump - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I was going to post this elsewhere, as I have never had a very stable system in any Mac OS. My days as a film editing assistant and editing were constant system troubleshooting, and restarting numerous times a day has always been my computing norm with any version of mac classic OS.OS X brought some stability, but with Kernel Panics, lost network connections that froze the system, and some sluggish performance that required rebooting to clean out -- that was not wünderbar. Add to that some required video editing in which a reboot would get cleaner video captures.
But the advances with OS X are now at the point (10.3.2, Dual 1 gig G4) where I power use the system with impunity! Currently running on 26 days, 9 hours without reboot while doing numerous processing endeavors: Final Cut Pro capture, editing, and output; complex DVD creation and burning; daily video chatting with AIM 5.5 and iChat Beta; Photoshop; Web design; Syncing with Treo; much network services (downloads and uploads) in background; HALO and Unreal playing in full screen or window; numerous DVD ripping and burning; some Garage Band creativity; voice operating computer with the built-in Speech Recognition -- much of the above daily for the past 26 days without any system hiccup, though some infrequent software quitting.
I don't think I've ever gone very long without some system issue. Though now I'll install that security update from a few days ago, which requires a restart...
colomb - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
The one thing I've noticed about application in OS X: sometimes preference files get corrupted. Regarding Unison, try trashing your prefs and seeing if that helps. May fix your Adium problems as well.Damien Sorresso - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Log out and then back in. Also, try clearing out your memory once in a while by entering the following command in the terminal.sudo periodic weekly
Enter your administrator password at the prompt.
Anonymous - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Log out and log back in.I've had the mouse pointer problem once or twice in the past. Logging out seems to help.