I have a mid 2009 MBP with Mavericks and am increasingly seeing the spinning wait cursor or spinning disc pointer – how do I try to troubleshoot what might be happening?
Indeed, in what situations does this object appear – are the situations purely internal in the sense of lack of CPU power or RAM or motherboard characteristics, or can external factors also impact such as HDD or network characteristics?
I presume that the spinner appears in response to the current application not to some background event, so, in troubleshooting I'd also presume you would need to look at logs of some sort of the current application and possibly of a general nature, things with which I'm not familiar.
MacOS – Troubleshooting the spinning wait cursor or spinning disc pointer
logsmacbook promacos
Related Solutions
Check out the man page for perfdiagnose. This tool is purpose-made for diagnosing exactly this sort of issue, where a simpler tool like Activity Monitor can only show you symptoms.
The output from perfdiagnose is not intended for end-users, but for developers and teams at Apple. If you're not able to make any sense of the logs it produces, your best bet is to attach them to a bug report submitted to Apple.
Check out Accessibility options in Preferences:
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Best Answer
One would use the Activity monitor in your Utility folder to find out the Loads to the CPU, RAM or Disk.
On my MBA 10.9.4 it looks like this: