Mac OS X: what causes the spinning beach ball?

Question

When does OS X decide to give your app a spinning beach ball? What can you do when programming an application to avoid this?

Designedly

Why have people flagged this for closing? This is an entirely programming related question (and and a fairly interesting one at that).. – Camargo

Marc Charbonneau fixed up my wording to make it clear I was asking a programming related question. Hopefully this holds off the close-happy people. Thanks Marc!! – Designedly

Answer 1

The window server will show the spinning wait cursor when the frontmost application, or the application that has a window under the mouse pointer, has not responded to events from the window server within a certain window of time.

To avoid the spinning wait cursor, an application needs to service events in a timely fashion. There's no way around this window server behavior, and for good reason: Applications on Mac OS X aren't ever supposed to be unresponsive to the user.

Nickname

It should be noted that Apple's Spin Control is a potentially useful tool for debugging these events. – Constringe

Answer 2

The reason is that your app is blocking the UI. As the other posters said, the window manager can notice that you haven't handled events in awhile and put up this UI.

Most likely you are doing some IO (such as reading or writing to the disk, or doing network requests) synchronously on the UI (default) thread. A good rule of thumb to keeping your app responsive (and thus avoiding the beachball) is to never do synchronous IO on the UI thread. You can either use asynchronous IO (APIs that take a callback, do work on a background thread, and then notify you on the UI thread when they are done), or else you can use a separate background thread to do the work.

If you aren't doing IO, then you are probably in some kind of long loop on the UI thread that is causing you to be unresponsive. In that case, either optimize or remove the loop, or move it to a background thread.

Narah

Answer 3

Assuming your application has sufficient hardware resources (which won't always be the case in reality), there's really no reason your app should ever beachball. If it does, figure out what section of code is blocking the user interface (if it's non-intuitive Shark.app will come in handy) and move that to a background thread (or use another strategy to eliminate the pause). Fortunately Cocoa and Objective-C have pretty good tools for threading, see NSOperationQueue to start with. Apple also has a few good documents on performance tuning, see this question for relevent links.

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