Mac OS X: Weird stuff going on this morning
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshMay 23rd, 2003 • 6:42 pm
A handful of weird problems in Mac OS X this morning.
It first started with Safari quitting unexpectedly while in the background, as I was browsing a site in Explorer (which doesn’t render well in Safari). The weird part is that Safari crashed without OS X giving me the usual “Safari has unexpectedly quit” alert dialog.
So I decided to file a bug report, and retrieved the CrashReporter log for that crash, copied it, and pasted it INTO a BBEdit document. I started writing my bug report, and logging in at Apple Bug Reporter in Safari, which I had relaunched after the crash, and in which no other page was open.
Safari loaded the usual bug report form, and I started filling it in. I wanted to paste both the crash log and a text version of my Apple System Profile in the “Configuration Information” field. So I copied each to the clipboard and paste them there one after the other. Then I clicked on “Submit” and… nothing. The button appeared to have no effect. No matter how many times I tried to click on it, nothing would happen. No activity in Safari. No new page loading, no “Connecting to” line in the status bar. Nada.
I have seen this behavior before in Safari. I wonder if it’s related to the fact that what I pasted in the “Configuration Information” field was too long (although there was no indication of this). I’ll have to try again. In any case, I clicked on the Refresh button to reload the form page.
Then I noticed that my entire system had become awfully sluggish. So I entered “top -u” in the Terminal. To my great surprise, Adobe Illustrator was at the top of the list, gobbling up over 60% of CPU power — even though the application was only open in the background with no document windows open.
So I quit Illustrator. Still sluggish. Now BBEdit and Console were duelling for top spot in the Terminal, both hovering above 50%. Didn’t make any sense. I quit them both. Things came back to normal. I restarted BBEdit and am typing this now, and BBEdit is nowhere to be seen in the Terminal list of most CPU-hungry processes. Very weird.
August 20th, 2004 at Aug 20, 04 | 2:51 am
Yes, Safari has done that to me. Just a while ago the finder was taking up half of the CPU while it was in the background. It quit it and restarted it ( I edited the finder icon in the dock to allow me to quit the finder at will). After the restart everything was fine. Safari seems to crash, at times, just as much as IE.