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

[Gordon Alley]

I've had my iMac G4 800 running with Leopard for about a week now.
My first attempt was to do an Archive and Install. I fought with it for a
day and a half, with crashes, hangs, etc. Then I tried a clean install,
followed by using the Migration Assistant to bring over my user accounts and
apps from the 10.4.12 backup I had made. I started getting crashes and hangs
again. I then went through all the various places where startup and login
items reside, and got rid of anything that I didn't need anymore, or that
just seemed kinda old (this machine had started out with 10.2, IIRC, and I
can't recall every doing a clean install upgrade before). After I did that
things seemed to work fine.

Except that about twice a day, the entire system would just stop responding,
generally in the morning after I'd been using it for a few minutes, or
similarly after I got home from work and had started using it. The only
recovery was a power-down and restart (but it did restart quite briskly).
After the restart, it seemed to work fine for as long as I wanted to use it.

I was about to give up and revert back to Tiger, when I decided to do a
little Google research. I saw threads about problems with Macs waking up
after sleeping. It occurred to me that the freezes were always happening a
few minutes after I woke the iMac up (I was sleeping it at night and while I
was at work). So I stopped putting it to sleep, and haven't had a freeze or
crash since. I intend to do a little more investigating about what might be
having trouble with sleep (internet research points fingers at Dashboard
widgets and external devices), but it is a low priority for the time being,
since it seems to be working pretty-much flawlessly unless it put it to
sleep.

Well there is one thing. I tried Front Row on it yesterday, and when I
selected Movie Trailers, it sat there trying to download trailers for many
minutes without any progress. But on the good side, Front Row responded to
an ESC to stop the download, and I was able to exit from FR without trouble.
I prefer to use my MacBook (late 2006) for that kind of stuff, anyway. It's
really a much more powerful machine. :-)

I appreciate your comments, but I think I'll stick with Leopard on my iMac
for the time being. It starts up faster, seems overall just snappier
(probably due in part to all the detritus I removed from it while debugging
the crashes), and the improved Spotlight has eliminated the need for some of
my launcher enhancement doodads (I do supplement it with OverFlow on both
Macs). Plus, now my Macs match!  :-)

-Gordon

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 9:22 AM, D & F Miller <millmail at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> On Apr 4, 2008, at 1:13 AM, Gordon Alley wrote:
>
> > 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > moneydance-info mailing list
> > moneydance-info at moneydance.com
> > http://moneydance.com/mailman/listinfo/moneydance-info
>
>
> Gordon,
>
> I have exactly the same machine and I tried Leopard on it.  IMHO, I
> found Leopard to be significantly inferior to Tiger on this machine.
> While it DID function, Leopard often hung for varying lengths of time
> - sometimes for quit a while.  Had a couple of complete system lock-
> ups, too.  I just don't think this iMac has the horsepower and
> hardware to function well with 10.5.  I did a clean install of Tiger,
> updated it, installed the few add-ons I really wanted,  and am happy
> with its performance.  It is not my main machine now, but when I need
> it, I can depend on it.  Just my experience.
>
> Frank
>
-- 
Gordon B. Alley
http://www.gordonalley.com