It's Freezing Out Here - Help! :)

[seriche]

Help!

I'm not a technophobe, but not a techie either, and I don't have time this morning to go looking for answers on the net.

I've been rushing to complete belated replies to posts this morning, but have been frustrated by a problem that only seems to be occuring when I'm writing posts to this forum. It's been happening for several days, and seems to be getting worse.

Every fifteen minutes or so, as I'm typing my reply, the page freezes (and all the smileys are paralysed ). And I then have to 'force quit' Firefox and lose all my writing as although it will let me highlight, it won't let me copy, or even let me take a screen shot of the page. So I now have to compose messages on Open Office and cut and paste to the reply page before the whole thing freezes again. Another problem is the Send/Preview panel greying out for no reason, but everything else working.

I took a quick look at my console, and one repeated error message crops up beyond all others:

28/09/2011 05:04:07 Spyder3Utility[153] *** attempt to pop an unknown autorelease pool (0x84ba00)

This is repeating itself anything from five times a minute to once every two minutes, but the Spyder program isn't obviously active on my Dock.

I'm using Firefox 6.0.2........and you probably don't need all this, but just in case

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac11,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s


I would be so grateful for any advice you could give to solve this problem, as I've had to rewrite so many posts and now doubt that I'll get all my replies done this morning, and my frustration levels are growing with each freeze

Cheers,

Seri

[jiro]

Oh, Seri. I wish I could be of help but I am no mac user. On a PC, I use process explorer and I can use that to see what is eating up my RAM memory and I can kill that process for troubleshooting. Considering the error code that you got, my guess is that SPYDER3 is eating up a lot of your RAM space causing any other programs that is active to hang up. For what I know, the latest version of Firefox is memory hungry, too. Hope our mac users will come to help you out soon. Hang in there, my friend.

[seriche]

Thanks M'Dear,

I'm off to the sea again to cool down Sloe-picking, searching for wild fungi, keeping company with the last barn owls hunting down their supper over the common, and the gulls waking up for breakfast

Being alone with nature never fails to lift my spirits and energise me..especially with a camera in hand...

Cheers,

Seri

[jiro]

Time to rest my weary soul for now while you enjoy the morning breeze. g'nite.

[The Wirefox]

Seri

Run maintenance scripts (all of them) but watch out for emptying your internet caches as history disappears - Use ONYX - www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx I have used it for years and it works really well. I dont think you have a RAM problem unless you have everything open at one.

Failing that I can only suggest you re-install Firefox. Does it happen with any othe r browser?

[The Wirefox]

Oh if you use Onyx use the automation function only. The others need some discretion to avoid messing anything up on your system. Tick all boxes unless you want your caches to be saved