Causing Mac OS X to completely freeze up.
I have been having complete freeze-ups lately, about one (max. 2) per day (I use the computer for several hours a day). I started noting down which program I was using at the times when my machine freezes and so far every single time has turned out to be Firefox. I use a few other programs for extensive amounts of times and none of them were frontmost (or even running, I believe) when the freezes happened. This makes me think Firefox is the source or at least what triggers the freezes.
The freezes happen randomly from what I am able to tell. They have happened right when submitting a form as well as when I am simply reading a page and not doing anything at all with the mouse or keyboard.
This started happening before I upgraded to Firefox 4 (so with Firefox 3.6) but it has become a lot more frequent after I upgraded (which is why I started tracking the frontmost application at the times of the freeze-ups since I began to suspect that it was Firefox).
The freeze-ups have manifested themselves in a few different ways so far:
- everything on the screen "freezes" and any type of input, whether it's the keyboard command for force-quitting the frontmost application or clicking anywhere on the screen, has absolutely no effect. only the mouse cursor still moves
- the same as above but I can't even move the mouse cursor
- the screen goes blank
- the screen turns white
The last two may also appear with many thin vertical lines running across the screen.
Tutte le risposte (1)
This lockup occurs more frequently for me if I have mythtv open.
It randomly locks up if I do this: 1) open mythtv 2) switch to the space firefox is on 3) start typing in the address bar
Most recent lockup, I was able to ssh into my mac. I tried killing firefox (eventually with -9 ) and it would not die. (Mythtv did die easily when killed.) Since -9 didn't kill it, it must be stuck in some kind of unkillable I/O wait.
Even after I killed all my user processes, the screen did not change. This is some kind of OS level GUI lockup.
These lockups started occuring for me immediately after upgrading to OS X 10.6.7 from the previous minor relsease.