[moneydance] Moneydance (build 606) frozen for several minutes

[Gordon Alley]

iMac G4 800, 1GB RAM, OS X 10.5.2 with current patches
Mondeydance 2008 (build 606)

Tonight I was reconciling a stock broker statement for January. There were
about 85 transactions in that period. After I achieved a 0 difference, I
clicked the DONE button in the reconciliation dialog. I expected a short
delay at that point, but this time it just sat there. I spent several
minutes, checking to make sure other apps were still responsive (they were,
though I could tell the system was pretty busy), and running the Activity
Monitor (Moneydance was shown as NOT RESPONDING with about 89% of the CPU -
the Floating CPU Window bar was pegged). Also, when the mouse pointer was
over a MD window, it was displaying the Spinning Beachball of Death.
I could select different MD windows and bring them to the front, but its
menus and other controls were unresponsive. I was about to kill MD with
CMD-OPT-ESC, but decided to leave it up while I composed this message, in
case I needed to check anything (and I was dreading repeating the whole
reconciliation process). After I had started typing this report (on a
MacBook that's located next to the iMac where MD is running), I happened to
glance back over at the Activity Monitor, and noticed that MD had dropped
back to 8.4% CPU usage, and, sure enough, it had completed the the
reconciliation and returned to normal. It had been unresponsive for at least
3-4 minutes.

The Mac I'm running on is pretty slow. Yes, Leopard isn't officially
supported on anything less than an 867 Mhz machine, but that iMac is
actually running better now than with Tiger - it might have something to do
with the fact that I ended up doing a clean install, and left out most of
the 3rd-party extensions and add-on software gizmos I had loaded it up with
in its earlier incarnations. But I've been running MD on it for many years,
and I don't think I've ever experienced a freeze like this.

And I can understand where some operation might cause a delay, but it
shouldn't stop responding to the OS for that long.

Just thought I'd post this report in case anyone else has had a similar
experience recently.

-Gordon

-- 
Gordon B. Alley
http://www.gordonalley.com