MacOS – Macbook Pro OSX 10.11.2 random freezing and spinning beachball – possible chrome

google-chromehangmacos

My Macbook Pro has been freezing a lot lately during normal computer operation. I get the spinning beach ball and i can't click on anything (although the mouse moves just fine).

I know this question has been asked a few different ways in the past. Let's assume that I've run a system diagnostic and everything is fine, and that I prefer not to blow away my OS and I that I would like to avoid re-installing the OS.

Since I'm not sure which program is causing the lock, where would I begin troubleshooting? The console logs are somewhat meaningless unless I know what to look for. Are there any specific things that occur during a lock — or rather following a hard restart? The only thing I could come up with is "BOOT TIME".

My initial thought was that this was being caused by Chrome — or something within Chrome since it was most active. I quickly checked the logs for BOOT TIME and I found a ton of these: 

 1/13/16 2:42:06.000 AM kernel[0]: Google Chrome He[529] triggered unnest of      range 0x7fff8a200000->0x7fff8a400000 of DYLD shared region in VM map 0xc0151441ee6bac9d. While not abnormal for debuggers, this increases system memory footprint until the target exits.

Any thoughts?

Thanks all.

Best Answer

The bible for troubleshooting software is:

You might want to jump to making a new user account and seeing if you can reproduce the hang there. If it's a pure incompatibility with google chrome your version and OS X your version, you should be able to replicate it in short order.

Also, keep some sort of log with:

  • what you change, when you do it, what you're trying to do
  • when you notice the hangs - date/time to the second if possible

After about 20 or 30 events, you'll start having enough data for a second person to look over things with you and help isolate things.

If you want to collect log files for each hang - you can use sudo sysdiagnose from terminal or use Activity Monitor to diagnose whatever app isn't responding or just use the key shortcut: Shift-Control-Option-Command-Period to trigger the collection. It might take 5 minutes, but that lets you take actionable data to Apple or Google if you can show a repeated hang. It also leaves diagnostic files on the drive so you can review the times with your paper list if needed.

Sorry for the general answer, but this procedure has helped me countless times both as the initial troubleshooter and the "helper" that comes in once some data is recorded.

Related Question