I know this might not be the best forum for this question, but since this thread currently has a lot of eyes on it I wanted to reach out and see if any one has experienced the same issue as me.
I am on a mid-2011 Mac Mini and I upgraded to Mountain Lion when it was released. Ever since I have been plagued with a freezing issue which is way worse than described by the OP.
What happens, 10-20 times per workday is the following:
I am in my workflow coding, sending e-mail, using Photoshop etc
At any seemingly random time, the app(s) I am using will become unresponsive
Soon after the Beachball appears and I cannot interact with most apps
After a period of time, usually between 10 seconds and 15 minutes (yes, minutes), everything un-freezes and goes back to normal
When the freezing happens, Chrome will not load webpages (stuck on "Waiting for cache" message). The Terminal will take forever to perform simple commands, such as "ls". TextMate will freeze when trying to save a file, or sometimes even when trying to input data. Finder will lock up totally.
At times during longer periods of freezing, there is a small burst of CPU cycles going through, so if I type "ls" in the Terminal, the command might execute after 40 seconds and then freeze again.
I have searched the web high and low for a solution, but haven't even found anyone with the same issue.
I have tried booting into safe mode, re-installing ML, uninstalling software, tampering with settings, isolating the behaviour to a certain app etc. I have found that the freezing occurs even after a clean reboot without starting any apps. There is nothing in the system logs. There is no extra network, cpu, memory or disk activity at the time. I have not found a single thing to pin this on.
Using Photoshop, Parallels and Skype seem to make the freezing more frequent, but they are not solely responsible for it.
Has anyone even seen this issue? At this point I have mostly given up on a solution, I am just looking for that "Who are you DenverCoder9? What did you see?" moment[1]
Is your disk healthy? That sounds like the behaviour of a dying harddisk (system locks up waiting for disk I/O as the harddisk retries, retries, retries until it finally gives up). Is there nothing in Console.app when this happens?
No, nothing in Console.app. I have run various disk diagnostics tools and they come up with nothing. My best guess is that it is the gfx drivers, but I have not found a way to manually re-install those on OS X.
I feel your pain, this happens to me too. I thought extra RAM would help, but it didn't. I thought a clean install would help, but it didn't. I hope "DenverCoder9" is out there. :)
I am on a mid-2011 Mac Mini and I upgraded to Mountain Lion when it was released. Ever since I have been plagued with a freezing issue which is way worse than described by the OP.
What happens, 10-20 times per workday is the following:
When the freezing happens, Chrome will not load webpages (stuck on "Waiting for cache" message). The Terminal will take forever to perform simple commands, such as "ls". TextMate will freeze when trying to save a file, or sometimes even when trying to input data. Finder will lock up totally.At times during longer periods of freezing, there is a small burst of CPU cycles going through, so if I type "ls" in the Terminal, the command might execute after 40 seconds and then freeze again.
I have searched the web high and low for a solution, but haven't even found anyone with the same issue.
I have tried booting into safe mode, re-installing ML, uninstalling software, tampering with settings, isolating the behaviour to a certain app etc. I have found that the freezing occurs even after a clean reboot without starting any apps. There is nothing in the system logs. There is no extra network, cpu, memory or disk activity at the time. I have not found a single thing to pin this on.
Using Photoshop, Parallels and Skype seem to make the freezing more frequent, but they are not solely responsible for it.
Has anyone even seen this issue? At this point I have mostly given up on a solution, I am just looking for that "Who are you DenverCoder9? What did you see?" moment[1]
Anyone?
[1] http://xkcd.com/979/