Often when I run DevonThink, Pathfinder (a more powerful finder) and Google I get a fair amount of beachballing on my 2021 M1 Mac mini w 16gb of memory and a 2Tb disk drive.
Clean my Mac will often popup and say I am running out of memory or that an app has become non responsive but activity monitor shows the CPU idling below 50% and the memory pressure at 40%.
I spent about $3,500 on a M1 14 in MacBook Pro w 32 Gb of memory and a 2 Tb disk and I often see the same problem. AArrggg
I was thinking of trading in my 2021 Mac mini for a M3 max studio when they become available but I’m not sure that an upgrade would solve the problem.
I was planning to have the Mac studio be my desktop for standard office type work, a bit of video creation as well as be the Devonthink database server, the file server as well as run Plex.
I’m not sure that the file server performance would be that much better when serving out files, one would think that w a 10gb nic that it would be really fast but comments on the web have indicated that Apple botched the rewrite of the Samba server on the Mac.
My current Mac mini w a 2.5 Ethernet interface is much slower than the celadon based QNAP Nas w a 1Gb card.
I have been around long enough to know that just throwing money at a problem when you have not determine the actual root cause can really be a waste of money.
Is a 10 GB based Mac Studio file server fast enough for daily use involving moving large number of files (200Gb) to a OWC 4 bay Raid 5 enclosure.
What do you suggest I do to find out what is causing the beachballing.
I have run Etracheck Pro and do not see any obvious issues.
Yes, I have similar issue with my M1 Studio. I run a lot of apps concurrently, but still wouldn’t expect this problem. Sometime the ball is spinning, or even stalled for minutes, but if I leave it whatever indigestion it is experiencing is resolved. It certainly doesn’t seem to be a CPU or Memory issue, so I sorta concluded there is a bottleneck somewhere else, … but actually I have no idea! It is really frustrating because when its on song it rips through its tasks!
If you’re seeing beachballing a lot and you’re not running out of memory, look for things like:
bad external drive connections
USB/thunderbolt docks or monitor daisy-chaining
problems with memory/other computer internals (i.e. have it tested by Apple)
apps that run in the background that could conflict with each other
It’s possible that a new computer will fix it but it’ll be because you have a fresh system without the problem installed/connected/running, not because the new computer has more capacity.
@SteveU75, Is it possible that you are still running Intel versions of some apps? That seems unlikely at this point in time, but it’s worthing checking.
Oh have you tried the old troubleshooting step of removing all peripherals (or removing one by one to try an identify errant connection) and see if things work better. I read an article that Apple has tighten protocol for Mac OS to recognise external drives. Some drives that have worked perfectly well in older versions of Mac OS now create issues. Your problem might be something like that?
In your Applications folder, select an app and press CMD+I, select Get Info from the File menu, or select Get Info from the popup context menu. Look for Intel or Universal or Apple Silicon.
Alternatively, under the Apple menu, navigate to About this Mac, More Info, System Report, Software, and Applications to get a list with this information. (I’m still on Ventura so this path may differ on Sonoma.)
You should report things like this to our support ticket system.
In DEVONthink, hold the Option key and choose Help > Report bug to start a support ticket.
Also, when the application is stalled, do a Spotlight search for Activity Monitor . Select our application in the list of processes - it should show “(Not Responding)” and the name in red - and press Command-Option-S to run a sample on it. When the sample window opens, press the Save button and save it to your Desktop. Please attach this text file to your Support Ticket so we can inspect it. Thanks!