Spinning BBOD

I'm not completely sure, but I think BOINC is causing my computer to have intermittent bouts of extreme slowdowns with the BBOD.

I'll be surfing the web and suddenly safari will stop and I get the spinning ball. I can switch between apps and drag windows, but any menu or keyboard action will be delays for 1 or 2 minutes. Then after maybe 5 minutes or so everything goes back to normal for awhile.

Twice when this happened I opened the BOINC manager and it had some kind of window "Trying to communicate with BOINC server" or something like that. Of course that could have been a symptom or a cause...

I shut down BOINC and haven't had this happen again.

I had noticed that it did happen about the time some of my WU should have been done...

Using 10.6.2 on an iMac. Boinc manager 6.6.36 (wxWidgets Version 2.8.7)

Okay I'm leaning more toward BOINC that before. As soon as I opened BOINC to check the version I got a short 10 second BBOD!)

And the 100% completed WU that was in my queue when I started it is gone. So I'm thinking that something has gone horribly wrong with up/downloading of WU.

Or it has been uploaded and reported... which is normal. :-)

See here.
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Jord

- BOINC FAQ Service
- BOINC User Wiki

Real is just a matter of perception.

Next time it happens, take a long in your console log, system log, and apache log (all in console.app) and see if there are any indications...

C
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Or it has been uploaded and reported... which is normal. :-)

See here.

Next time it happens, take a long in your console log, system log, and apache log (all in console.app) and see if there are any indications...

C

Okay it just happened again. A few moments after I activated BOINC manager for the first time in days. I think they are related.

I checked the console and here is what I found. The console messages have a bunch of

3/2/10 6:43:57 PM Safari[187] EVERNOTE: I'm in the toolbar.

Those have been going on a lot, but I don't think it is the problem.

System.log shows:

Mar 2 18:55:50 rothrocks-imac Safari[187]: Periodic CFURLCache Insert stats (iters: 423) - Tx time:0.005399, # of Inserts: 2, # of bytes written: 11145, Did shrink: NO, Size of cache-file: 181936128, Num of Failures: 0

Don't know what that is.

I found apache2 under /private/var/log, there are a bunch of different ones under that, but the most recent one is appfirewall.log and there is the following entry from about the same time:

Mar 2 18:56:16 rothrocks-imac Firewall[60]: Stealth Mode connection attempt to UDP 10.0.1.199:53157 from 10.0.1.1:53

None of that seems particularly incriminating.

The beach ball can be caused by many things but if you have been using the computer a lot you may want to consider this. I had a old G4 400 mz system that I used for over 6 years and this program made a big difference after it spent over 10 hours cleaning up my disk. While Apple computers do a good job at avoiding fragmentation, they don't prevent all of it.
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Here's another thought for you... I was having a lot of that BBOD problem, and I read somewhere, probably a post on this forum, that increasing the shared memory would help. Mine was the standard 4MB of shared, so I followed the directions here: http://www.spy-hill.net/help/apple/SharedMemory.html and increased my shared memory to 16MB. Much of the BBOD problem went away. This was on a MBP Core Duo about 2.5 years ago, or so. Problem repeated it self when I got the MBP C2D which I have now. Increasing the shared memory helped on this one also.

C
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