MacOS – Mountain Lion System Freeze – Poor Memory Handling

hangmacosmemory

Useful details: Core2Duo mid 2010 Macbook Air, 128Gb SSD, 2Gb RAM.

Since I upgraded to Mountain Lion I've had this occur a few times. I'll be running my system and it'll completely freeze, no response to keyboard or trackpad other than the ability to hard power off.

In general it's when I have VirtualBox, Safari, Sublime Text 2, Terminal and Spotify running, but it'll be fine up until some unknown point and then thats it. Occasionally it'll unfreeze and I'll have messages about UI updates being suspended by (insert app here), but most of the time it forces the fans on high and starts trying to crunch on something.

Mountain Lion seems a bit snappier than Snow Leopard was for me on this machine, but it seems to be a large chunk worse for memory management, has anyone run across similar issues? Starting points for me to try optimise?

Best Answer

Since re-install Mountain Lion my system freezing very often (randomly). It seems like disk freeze for 15-30sec. I suspect some bug. But after huge effort to investigate problem I found that in my case the solution is to delete sysem logs. In terminal:

sudo rm /var/log/*

I don't know what was wrong (it was clean install of ML) but it work for me (two days until now) and looks stable.

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MacOS – Keyboard and Mouse freeze after deep sleep (Mountain Lion)

I had the same issue on my Macbook Air and Mountain Lion.

The quickest way to solve this is to disable the login screen or the "ask for password" setting.

If you're worried about privacy, do the following:

Reset PRAM
Reset SMC

If it still doesn't work, disable deep sleep mode (hibernate) by doing this:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Note that doing the above will only put your computer on battery sleep and this will affect battery life when you're not using your mac.

MacOS – MBP with Mountain Lion 10.8.3 loses connection to system SSD at random times and freezes

A firmware update for that SSD was released early this year: have you updated? The release notes mention:

Resolved a power-up timing issue that could result in a drive hang, resulting in an inability to communicate with the host computer. The hang condition would typically occur during power-up or resume from Sleep or Hibernate. Most often, a new power cycle will clear the condition and allow normal operations to continue.

(Personally I'm using a CT128M4SSD2 and have decided not to update unless I encounter issues.)

Best Answer

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MacOS – Keyboard and Mouse freeze after deep sleep (Mountain Lion)

MacOS – MBP with Mountain Lion 10.8.3 loses connection to system SSD at random times and freezes

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