Macbook issues

[kajarainbow]

So my Macbook's suffering from a problem right now. It started last Thursday. It seems that if I try to do too much, programs begin exhibiting spinning beachballs and the wireless connection craps out. Furthermore, those programs will always lock up after that, even though they will function fine on a regular reboot if I don't run too much at once. Not sure what might be causing this. I can do far less at once than I could before.

For example, my torrent program now causes this just from running it.

It's notable that I'm not experiencing this issue on the Windows partition, so it seems most likely to be software rather than hardware related.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Comments

[pete23.livejournal.com]

Have a look in activity monitor - see if there are anyunexpected CPU or memory hogs?

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't see any. I actually run a menu item that monitors memory and CPU usage, and they weren't showing particularly high values. Nothing this laptop's had any problems with before. Activity monitor didn't show any particular hogs either, though I'll try cranking up the number of active torrents again (I have it running just one torrent without problem).

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

How much space is left on your hard drive?

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

About 118 GB--just a little less than half of the hard drive is free.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hm, well that rules out "getting stuck in virtual memory hell". Or maybe not. Did you start torrenting Something Huge that day, or did you resume torrenting Something Huge?

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

Actually, I did. About 15 GB's worth of multiple torrents.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Okay, try this - start the torrent client, do NOT let all the torrents resume automatically. Resume ONE, and it will probably sit there for a while grinding through the file to see what fragments you have. Once it's done that and started connecting to other people, resume another; repeat.

(This is part of why I have this continuing attempt to move torrenting off of the machines we actually use onto a machine with a wired connection to the router, that just sits there and torrents. Plus it lets us sleep the boxes we actually use!)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

And, of course... did you install, or run anything new recently?

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

About that time frame... WoW and an Apple Software Update that was just to iTunes and Front Row, though neither were right before it. I don't know why I even bother updating stuff like iTunes, other than to get them off my Software Update window.

If huge torrents can create huge VM swaps, that might be the problem there. Maybe.