Applications hang on startup

[aishafenton]

Hi all,

About once every two-three weeks I get the following;
When I try to start up any application they will hang (beach ball) for about 1-4 minutes before finally starting up. Once the machine is in this state it will effect any application I try to start or quit. After waiting 1-4 minutes for an app to start, it seems to work fine. All apps that were already running continue to work fine.

So far I haven't be able to trace it down to any one thing that sets this behavior off - the rest of the time my machine works fine. If I restart my machine (a logout doesn't help) everything goes back to normal (for about two to three weeks).

I have looked at:
- CPU usage is usually low, say under 20%
- Temperature on system varies between 30 - 40C
- I use an NFS mount and it feels almost like a NFS timeout, but i can browse my NFS mount just fine while these apps are hung.
- Sleep settings. I have disabled automatic machine sleep.
- Screen saver. I can be using the machine when it will suddenly start acting like this, so Sleep settings and Screen savers don't seem to be the cause.
- I have tried killing almost every process that is running and it hasn't helped. Even killing the Finder and Dock process do not help.

Please any ideas anyone? This is really bugging me. Could it be hardware related?? Seems strange since already running apps continue to work fine??

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Machine: G4 450 Cube
Ram: 640Mb
Network: Ethernet, I connect to an NFS server
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[Kameleon]

Open a terminal window and type 'top' and hit Enter. This shows you what kind of processes are using your CPU. From the looks of your post, you might allready have done this.

Open a console window and see what's going on.

Do you have any kind of process which automatically checkes for updates on the internet?

There are several kind of ehrm... indexing processes done by Mac OS X automatically. They are scheduled every day in the middle of the night. Is your time or timezone correct?

 

[ex2bot]

Do you have a SAMBA connection?

(I'm thinking about SMB hanging my machine when the PC is sleeping. Applications start up, attempt to access all volumes including SMB, and. . . spinning beach ball for minutes!) Uh. . . that's a feature, right?

Doug