The Spinning Beach Ball of Death

The spinning wait cursor or spinning disc pointer — a progress indicator where your mouse pointer changes from an arrow to the rotating color wheel or "spinning beach ball" seen at right — generally indicates that your system is engaged in a very processor-intensive activity.

In most cases, the "beach ball" will usually disappear within five to ten seconds, depending on the processor speed of, and installed RAM in, the Mac® in question. For example, applying a Gaussian blur to a large file in Adobe® Photoshop® can be a very processor-intensive activity.

However, there are cases when the "beach ball" spins for a much longer period of time, a condition sometimes referred to as The Spinning Beach Ball of Death (SBBOD). This FAQ — which is derived from a corresponding chapter in our book Troubleshooting Mac OS X — discusses causes of the SBBOD and how to resolve them.

Frequent SBBODs due to processor-intensive activity

Causes

• Running too many applications concurrently.
• Running processor-intensive applications with limited RAM or free disk space.

Solutions

• If you experience frequent occurrences of the "beach ball" — or the longer SBBOD — when using processor-intensive applications, run fewer applications concurrently.
• See our "Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space" FAQ.

SBBOD spins for 30-35 seconds. You may hear your hard drives spinning up.

Cause

Hard Drive Sleep.

To conserve energy, modern hard disk drives are designed to spin-down after a certain period of inactivity. This is usually referred to as "hard drive sleep" but the technical term is Standby mode.

In Standby mode, the hard drive is in a state of low energy consumption and its platters have ceased to spin. It is awaiting a read or write instruction, at which time the hard drive will spin-up its platters — wake up and enter Active mode — to perform the read or write operation. It can require up to 30-35 seconds for a hard drive to spin up once in Standby mode.

If you access a disk that is in Standby mode, you may see the SBBOD for up to 30-35 seconds while its platters spin-up and the disk switches to Active mode.

One might think that de-selecting Put the hard drive to sleep when possible in the Sleep tab of Energy Saver preferences would prevent hard drives from ever sleeping. However, this is not necessarily the case.

Energy Saver preferences are a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the pmset Terminal command, used to modify power management settings. The spindown argument of pmset specifies the minutes of inactivity after which the hard drive will sleep, i.e. enter Standby mode.

When you select Put the hard drive to sleep when possible in the Sleep tab of Energy Saver preferences, behind the scenes a pmset command is issued with the argument

in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger® or later. In Mac OS X 10.3 Panther® and Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, the argument is

When Put the hard drive to sleep when possible is de-selected in the Sleep tab of Energy Saver preferences, behind the scenes a pmset command is issued with an argument of

This can result in secondary hard drives, such as FireWire drives or other internally-installed drives, entering Standby mode if a read or write operation has not been performed to these drives within three hours. As a result, accessing these drives can result in an appearance of the SBBOD as these drives switch from Standby to Active mode.

The Put the hard drive to sleep when possible preference works this way to assure System sleep works as expected. [1]

However, some secondary hard drives will not obey these power management settings: they will still spin-down on their own schedule regardless of the power management settings. This appears to be a function of either the drive itself or, in the case of external hard drives, the firmware or chipset employed in the enclosure. In such cases, there is no way to change the drive's spin-down behavior. One can contact the manufacturer of the secondary drive, or its enclosure, to see if a firmware update is available.

Power management in Mac OS X, such as hard drive sleep, is complex. Readers who wish to learn more about this subject should consult the "Power Management" section of the "Managing Power and Device Removal" chapter of the Apple® Developer Connection document I/O Kit Fundamentals.

Solutions

• You can minimize occurrences of the SBBOD due to hard drive sleep by making the following selections in the Sleep tab of Energy Saver preferences:
  1. select Never for System sleep, and
  2. de-select Put the hard drive to sleep when possible.
• If System sleep is set to Never, then deselecting Put the hard drive to sleep when possible issues a pmset command with an argument of

• in Tiger or later. In Panther or Jaguar, the argument is

• where a value of 0 means never.
• If you are experiencing this problem with applications that are reading or writing "scratch" or "temporary" files to secondary drives, configure the application's preferences to write these files to your Mac OS X startup disk. This, combined with

1. selecting Never for System sleep, and
2. de-selecting Put the hard drive to sleep when possible

• should minimize or eliminate the occurrence of SBBODs with these applications.

Additional details about hard drive sleep are addressed in the "Hard Drive Sleep" chapter of our book, Troubleshooting Mac OS X.

The SBBOD appears when opening the Help Viewer

Cause

If you are connected to the Internet, the Help Viewer checks for the latest help information on Apple's Web site when it is opened and when searching for help. If you have used Help infrequently, or if you have a slow Internet connection, the SBBOD may appear.

Note: This issue was more prevalent in Jaguar.

Solutions

See:

• The AppleCare Knowledge Base document "Mac OS X 10.2: Mac Help Is Slow, Displays Spinning Disc Pointer."
• Our "Troubleshooting Help Viewer" FAQ.

The SBBOD appears when quitting Microsoft Applications

Cause

Certain Microsoft® applications, such as those in Office, employ an anti-piracy approach whereby, before quitting, the application uses the Internet to "phone home" and validate its software registration. If you are connected to the Internet and have the Mac OS X firewall enabled, the default firewall settings block this outbound transmission. In such cases, the SBBOD will go on for up to two minutes before the application abandons its attempt to "phone home."

Solutions

• Disable the Mac OS X firewall before quitting Microsoft Office applications.
• Wait for the two minutes or so it will take before the application abandons its registration verification process.

An application displays the SBBOD for a reason other than those above

Causes

1. An application has encountered a problem and may be frozen or hung.
2. Your Mac is frozen or hung.

Solutions

• Give the application a minute or so to see if it will either return to normal functioning or will quit. Moving your mouse pointer off the potentially frozen application in Mac OS X will return it from the spinning beach ball to a mouse pointer, and you can continue work in other applications. If the application exhibiting the SBBOD does not return to normal function or quit within a minute or two, you can Force Quit the application using any of the following methods:
  • Option-click on the applications Dock icon and selecting Force Quit from the resulting context menu.
  • Select Apple > Force Quit, then selecting the frozen application in the resulting menu.
  • Press Command-Option-Escape, then selecting the frozen application in the resulting menu.
• See the "Freezes and Hangs" chapter of Troubleshooting Mac OS X.

Notes

[1] This is documented in the source code for pmset. It is technically possible to use the pmset command to set spindown 0 while setting the sleep argument to a non-zero value. However, the pmset command will issue a warning that System sleep (idle sleep) may not behave as expected. For example, the following command sets hard drive sleep to never (spindown 0) and System sleep to occur after 20 minutes of inactivity (sleep 20):

The command results in the following alert:

• Warning: Idle sleep timings for "AC Power" may not behave as expected.
• - Disk sleep should be non-zero whenever system sleep is non-zero.