OSX 10.5.2 with 2GB DDR2 667 RAM and 2Ghz Core2 Duo

18.9GB free on System Volume

Is there a way to run fsck during boot phase before / volume is mounted read-write, similar to other Unices? Usually running fsck on a mounted volume is not advisable.

Running a SMART lookup on the disk drive lists no problems or hardware/block errors.

What would be an indicator for this? Failed fsck routine?

I am seeing an odd error (odd to me anyways) during the login phase:
May 27 13:41:13 macbook-pro-15 SecurityAgent [679]: NSExceptionHandler has recorded the following exception:
NSRangeException -- *** -[NSCFArray objectAtIndex:]: index (0) beyond bounds (0) Stack Trace: 0x3719a 0x93c7a0fb 0x90ab202b <snip> (29 more hex string values)

booting into single user mode you can run fsck, by holding down cmd + S right at power on will boot you into SUM. Run fsck from there and see if it gets any errors in doing so.

Nah, 16 isn't a lot of icons. Usually, I see people with 50+ and then things get slow. (I think this bug was fixed in Leopard. Anyone know?)

Is this after a restart/boot, or does it also happen after a regular log out?

The error you see in the console log after login may be accompanied by a crash. Is there a crash log for Security Agent listed in Console.app? What login items do you have listed in System Preferences > Accounts?

What third-party software do you have installed?

Does this slowdown happen with a new, fresh user account?

Sounds OK to me. Usually you should leave at least 3-5GB free, or stuff slows down a lot, and the disk starts to churn even more.
Yep, it's called Single User Mode. Hold down Command+S immediately when you start your computer, before the Apple appears. After a few moments, a terminal-like screen should appear.

Then you can type in something like
A bit more detailed info on this is here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417

Although SMART can't catch all disk errors, it's still a good sign.
Usually when fsck fails, there's definitely something wrong with the filesystem. From past experiences on this board, filesystem corruption is a usually a Bad Thing™.


Looks like other people are having this error in a bunch of other programs, so maybe it's just from a line of debugging code?
http://www.google.com/search?q=Secur...wing+exception
Doesn't seem to be causing

Jeff, is it one, or the other, or both? We're talking very different things here.

The first thing I would do in trying to diagnose a beachball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor) problem is to look at the system.log and console.log where messages are usually time-stamped. Any messages at the time of the problem?

Next try the following:
- log in as a different (preferrably freshly-created) user. Does the problem exist there?
- startup in Safe Mode by holding down the Shift key after you hear the startup chime. Does the problem exist there?

If the above doesn't give any clues as to the nature of the problem, you could bring in the big guns - the Apple Developer tools ("Xcode Tools", which are on one of the DVDs that came with your Mac) includes "Instruments" which is a set of performance monitoring tools. Using those tools should show you what is happening.

The application is attempting to retrieve an object from an array. The array has N items in it, numbered 0 to (N - 1). The application asked for the object at position that was either less than 0 or greater than (N - 1). This raises an exception and the system logs the error automatically. (So in a sense, it's debugging information, but only because the application actually did something it shouldn't have.)

Edit: In this specific case, it looks like the array was empty, and the app tried to query it for an object. Oops.

Before going that far, there's always Activity Monitor, which can sample a running application.

It shouldn't be... Look into the possibilities that tlarkin suggests.

jeffwsi, you've now had four requests to create a brand new user and tell us if the slowdowns continue there (five if you include this post). Could you please check that out and let us know?

Also, you mention an error message on startup, and that error message is nothing to worry about. I'm curious, though, do you have an error message in your logs when you try to launch an application and it takes two minutes?

OK, if you have an objection to doing an Archive and Install, that's fine--keep troubleshooting. But if it takes you days to troubleshoot this, versus 30-40 minutes to Archive and Install, I know which choice I would make. YMMV.

Trevor

I agree completely - except for one thing:
If someone is dedicated enough to troubleshoot the problem to the point of figuring out what the cause was, there is the possibility that they might learn that the problem stemmed from something that they did (e.g. installing haxie XYZ, or removing file PDQ) and therefore they will know enough to avoid doing the same thing in the future.

Yes, that is a good point.

Trevor

Typo alert:

My defragmentation post is too old for me to edit, but I just re-read it and realized I meant to type LESS THAN 20 MB. Not more. Sorry if this caused any confusion for anyone.

Sorry for the thread bump, too.

Since your initial post was regarding spyware, MacScan will get rid of tracking cookies (I run MacScan every few days and find at least a dozen of them in that amount of time). It's supposed to find most spyware, including Trojan Horses, keyloggers, etc. Over the few months I've used it, it only showed tracking cookies in the display of what it found.

As far as speed overall, My Imac seemed to benefit most from disabling most fonts. Read this article: http://katzwebdesign.wordpress.com/2...worked-for-me/

I have also eliminated unneeded languages using Monolingual and reduced the size of programs using Xslimmer, both of which may have helped speed. Try any or all and see if they help.

In my honest opinion (and I believe the opinion of many others on this forum), MacScan is a complete waste of money (my condolences to you wala). Scanning software will always find tracking cookies (provided that you actually browse the net). However, you can easily delete these cookies yourself ("Reset Safari" or "Clear Private Data") - you don't need MacScan or any other software to do it for you. Note too that those tracking cookies are only as dangerous as the websites you visit. If you are concerned about the types of cookies that are finding their way onto your computer, you can change your privacy settings in your browsers to something less permissive.

I seriously doubt this has any impact on speed. As far as I know, neither eliminating localizations nor eliminating excess code in a universal binary actually reduces the amount of bytes loaded into memory. Since you have the same amount of code in memory before and after "slimming", I doubt anything is going to perform any faster. Perhaps load times might be marginally improved, but I doubt that would be perceptible. Someone enlighten me if I'm wrong.

if you think your problems are disk related, then i suggest you boot from the leopard install dvd and run the disk repair facility. after that you can also try booting in safe mode because i think that does some sort of repair/defrag automatically as well.
-marc

Funny that this thread just died on the vine without a resolution...
Looking for the sequel. Anyone know what the resolution was to this?

Thanks