Spinning BeachBall of Death in DAZ 4.9 on Mac
MW_HNL
Posts: 45
Mac related question in case you do not know what the spinning beachball of death means...
After over a month of nightmare loading, reloading, so much for so many hours over and over that it literally wore out my solid state system drive and I had to replace it, I have DAZ 4.9 working I think and after two lost months am getting back to actually making renders. Each time I give it permissions it asks for and lets it log me in and I have laboriously clicked over and over and over on things and lived with frozen servers etc until I have now got the DAZ special content extra library moved off the system drive where it was glutonizing available space. So I get pretty happy icons for almost everything. Still some things seem unable to find icons that are right where they are supposed to be but at least they load and work if I click on the exclaimation point default cannot find PNG icon. At least I was able to do a memory upgrade when I bought a larger SSD for my poor Mac who needed ice packs to stay cool during the multiple 18 hour downloads or longer.
Questions:
Why do I get the spinning beachball of death for up to several minutes each time I exit DAZ 4.9? Never happend with DAZ 4.8. Clearly DAZ 4.9 is stuck doing stuff trying to exit cleanly and I am very paranoid about not letting it finish each time. If I look it is even in the side bar with a black ball next to it.
Now that I have hopefully proven I am a good person and actually purchased all that stuff I bought (with hours and hours of installing and updating after DIM already did all that allegedly) and DAZ has finally decided to show it to me, can I work offline?
I am reconstructing my extensive personal libraries organized so I could find stuff as Smart Content has always proven useless. It was lost about the 6th time I had to go to the well and redownload all 1200 plus files all over again with DIM in yet another attempt to get DAZ 4.9 installed with libraries where they have to be and to work like DAZ 4.8 was ticking along very nicely.
I do not want to start that all over again. Is it essential to always log on and prove you actually own what you bought every time you use DAZ 4.9 or can you actually work offline? Will that stop the spinning beachball of death and the minutes long time DAZ 4.9 takes to exit now?
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Comments
I think I can answer that for you, I just looked at that problem myself.
If you take a spindump (Activity Monitor.app) and sample, you will see what DS is doing, post it here and I can explain. (Been digging through Mac OS/OS X dumps since 1986)
Just need the header and the first thread dump btw.
If it was a recent installation / reinstallation and your internet connection is a little slow, this can just be DAZ Studio 4.9 finishing syncing with the Cloud.
I suspect some kind of synching with a cloud of some kind also. But it happens every time I do anything with DAZ 4.9 which has been "installed" now for over three weeks and I have been working to reconstruct my lost custom directories of sorted and reorganized content and get what I could save from before in the way of props and sets etc I created and saved fixed and working again. Anything such as create a new scene or save a new set or edit a figure seems to accumualte. These things seem to build up and the longer I have been working the longer my DAZ 4.9 takes to finally manage to exit. So I have been in the habit of exiting DAZ every hour or so to prevent it from taking more than a minute or two for it to finally settle down. Today I got into a project and I worked for a couple of hours on fixing up stuff from before the move to 4.9 and it took like five minutes plus to finish and finally exit DAZ.
Big question is: At what point can I return to working offline?
Do I have to always log in to be able to fully use my purchased content?
Or at some point when DAZ can no longer find any Pending, Updates or new stuff that needs to be "installed" in Smart Content, when everything has a nice border and says new and is in color and has no icon up in the upper right hand corner to actually "install" or "update", can I just work offline until I purchase something new and have to let DIM install it and then go into DAZ and let DAZ install it in the new second library for it to actually be available offline.
Initially I did not realize DAZ was even making a second copy of my library. But the first time I updated to DAZ 4.9 the location for that got defaulted to my system directory for this second directory copy, the connect one. And my Mac became more and more brain dead over the next week until I noticed there was like 80 megabytes left on my system drive and I had to start trying to also move that directory to another drive and that got very confused. There used to be a useful command to tell DAZ to "forget" directories it was to no longer use and I could not find that in DAZ 4.9 so I just tracked down and erased any of these from the system drive until all the confused "orphan" files and so forth finally disappeared and installs started to seem to work correctly and my content under Products reappeared and almost everything got its icon back. Key seemed to be a directory from a long time ago before I moved the 4.8 main data directory off onto a second drive that DAZ somehow still remembered had "content" in it long since relocated and no longer in the directory manager list. But not forgotten?
The strange thing is that to see the spinning beachball of death (which has been prettied up BTW in el Capitan) you have to put the mouse cursor up into the top white bar. If you start something else you get the message pop up that "DAZ has quit unexpectedly". Unless you leave the mouse cursor up top so you can see the SBofD actually finally go away. And in the Dock DAZ 4.9 has a black line around it and a black dot as well until it finishes whatever it is up to.
I do not remember ever asking DAZ to specifically use any cloud at all. Just tried to get it to verify and actually make available all my purchased content the way it was under 4.8.
Big Aloha and Thanks for the response. I will see if I can capture that activity monitor data.
Store login in DAZ Studio is required to use DAZ Connect downloaded content, but it's only required when you have changed things, like updated DS Studio, changed configuration like which disk your content is installed on. You don't have to login every time you use it. If you need to login, DAZ Studio will tell you that.
OK that really helps.
I tried activity monitor. I could see DAZ start a number of processes but nothing massive. I could see a really big CPU work load while I did a render, no surprise there. I fiddled about a bit and then exited and got Beachball for about 30 seconds or so and tried making screen captures of actiity before and after. I tried several times and then all of a sudden when I exited there was a bright red entry that said DAZ not responding with lots of threads. So I tried to reproduce that because my screen capture finger was not fast enough and got this.
Now that I think I have DAZ 4.9 all on board and All my content in both directories and blessed etc. I will try working offline until I buy something new or there is a system update or I get the message you mentioned.
Thanks very much. We have fairly decent connectivity for Americans and in the last few weeks I have noticed DIM download speeds better than I have ever seen them in the year since I joined (our local supplier claims to have increased our download speed and that may be true, or DAZ may have fixed up its servers or both but there has been a speed bump in communication with DAZ. But twice I did manage to get actiity monitor (the only other thing running) to reveal a red message that said DAZ not responding.
Under the "cog popup" in activity monitor, select "sample application" and post the result (copy the text from the sample window).
FWIW...
I don't have a HUGE Daz content library, but I do have many gigabytes of Poser 7 content.
I prefer to work offline and have zero issues on my Mac Pro.
Yes, I have two Mac Pros and a MacBook Pro (when on the road) and have very few issues, but I did have before (with DS 2 or 3) and before I understood how things were supposed to work, I learned it by looking inside the files ;-)
I tried work offline and indeed the beachball did not appear. I went back to online and took a few scenes I had modified and saved critical subsets as sets. Then exited. Lots and lots of beachball time. I did examine activity monitor up and down and could not find anything called "cog popup" in the list but the red Daz not responding was at the top of the list sorted by CPU time until the beachball finally went away. About 5 minutes of activity in DAZ generated about 1 minute of beachball on exit.
Second question about offline since you clearly know about this stuff.
When I double click on DAZ I get a popup to allow. Then when DAZ opens and I also get a second exact popup to allow on top of the screen to login. I have to accept or deny both of these popups to continue and get them off the login screen so I can choose to log in or work offline.
What are the consequences of selecting Deny on these popups? Should I allow one or both of these even if I plan on selecting work offline now that I appear to have my DAZ 4.9 library sorted and blessed?
Also the long downloads according to what little time tech help could give me on the tickets was some kind of hardware problem with the DAZ servers. This seems to have resulted in my "Blessed Installs" under smart content going into "waiting for data from DAZ" mode most of the time all frozen up. This seems to have been corrected. Also in DIM at the bottom there is a speed indicator in some kind of unit. So many ways to state that but the digits used to be 400 k on average when things were working right and downloading after a new purchase and peaking at about 600 k when things were optimal. Now it runs at 1.9 to 2 mega instead about 4 to 5 times faster so my connection to DAZ has never been faster in the history of the last year (I just had to re-up my PC membership).
Maybe the cog process went away in el capitan? The beachball looks different now something I had not realized until I upgraded to DAZ 4.9 and started routinely seeing it again.
Here it is.....
That popup is because you have the firewall running, you can either tell OS X that postgres is OK or click OK every time or smart content wont work.
Thanks for your patience while I get with the program. (I started with a Mac Classic about the same time you did but have not written assembler in many years)...
Thanks for the pointer to cog. I indeed found spindump under it. I did a spindump before launching for practice. Then I went online (thanks very much for clearing up what to do about the deny or allow popups! BTW)
Did some save of some development sets I have made from scratch using kits like Room Creator and parts extracted via Hexagon from others that were saved as scenes and saved the good ones as subsets which seems to make the beachball furious. Exited and indeed up comes beachball and after a second or two the red DAZ not responding. Took a spindump and saved as text file and then did a find of DAZ and got two entries. First seemed uninteresting. Second seemed to be for the red entry.
Aloha and Mahalo (thanks).
It's doing something with the cloud, maybe something changed server side as I saw something like this recently but not before. I'll check with those who might know.
Again, for what it's worth... I don't use smart content at all, so when working offline I deny postgres connections. No problems.
What's unusual about this is I've added postgres to my firewall and told it to always block - but I still get the popup everytime I launch Studio.
I'm guessing this is probly because it has a different pid, or spawns a new instance of postgres each time or something... or it has something to do with SIP.
But I'd expect my mac to be smart enough to remember my choice.
A normal running D|S installation usually has several instances of Postgres chugging away in the background, although I would have thought adding it to the firewall once should have done the trick. Something weird going on there...
IMHO the Mac firewall is astonishly useless unless you are connected to a public network. While I don't advocate mac users give up using it "just 'cus" I do promote Mac users looking into what a FW does and more importantly what it' doesn't do.
http://www.thesafemac.com/do-i-need-a-firewall/
Good input, thanks. I reviewed the firewall settings and noticed incoming was prohibited on some of the stuff activity monitor saw DAZ using. I enabled incoming connections on those items and tried again with the full working online. I had been doing tons of offline stuff and expected to get beachball for enough time to refill my coffee twice. Got beachball on exit alright but it seemed to last only about 30 seconds and exit cleanly in spite of all the accumulated offline activity. I am not sure how these things got set to do not permit, I did not do it. Must have been a default. Finding these blocked settings apparently defaulted in the Apple firewall may have helped a bit with the online exit. But working offline is the answer now that I know it should not be a problem with 4.9.
What I am doing now based on the good input here is deny first request wait for DAZ 4.9 to open. Allow second request and then click on work offline. DAZ 4.9 seems happy with this and so far nothing sideways or funny. And it exits almost instantly even after a long session of remaking my carefully constructed folders for the stuff I use all the time down in the "Categories" area where I keep directories of "copies" of all the poses for Gen4 and another for all the poses for Gen6 all sorted out and all my favorite prop collections with separate subdirectories for MATs and wardrobes for Gen 6 and another for Gen4 etc. Plus a big area of all my favorite Room Creator like building kits and prop collecitons like street sign maker. I am so glad to be able to trust DAZ again enough to work on getting this set up again like it was under 4.8.
Frankly when I heard about 4.9 I hoped it was to finally eliminate the entire idea of the dysfunctional Smart Content and enhance the ability to make customized folders yourself. Certainly not to teach it to create an entire second content directory in order to function complete with the apparent need to install things twice. But I am so glad to be back to rendering and building instead of struggling with getting my purchased content authorized and actually re-installed and all the orphan references to vanish etc.
Thanks for the help and feedback. Folks in these forums are a valuable resource.