- Joined
- Apr 12, 2021
- Messages
- 903
- Motherboard
- Asus z590 ROG Maximus XIII Hero
- CPU
- i9-11900K
- Graphics
- RX 6600 XT
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
You can clear a ton of caches, including areas in /private which are far off the beaten path, by booting into Safe mode:
• Hold Shift in OpenCore while launching macOS.
The free utility Onyx from Titanium SW also can clean various caches. Get the version appropriate for Sonoma. Study its options.
A common reason for Finder stalls is a full drive—not necessarily the boot drive.
Also a failing drive.
After a system install, Spotlight indexing can make the system unresponsive, e.g., beachball.
BTW— beachball always means the system is waiting for I/O that's taking a long time, either due to overload or storage failure. There are many ways a system can overload. The system works based on virtual memory, where RAM may be backed by space on the boot drive, so problems with the boot drive can affect the central functioning of the system in many ways. But certain app behaviors can also tip it over.
While these are traditional issues for any OS and may appear at any time...
The original post asked if there is anything special with Sonoma, and included mention of at least one live system backup connected. This reminded me of problems I've had, beginning with macOS releases that rely on APFS Signed System Volume (so since Big Sur) where a full system backup attached by USB would spontaneously cause the Finder to hang. By sheer luck I discovered this was related to user APFS snapshots added via CCC backups (CCC's default behavior replacing SafetyNet for APFS user-data-only backups).
As a total aside, I've mentioned this experience in a few past threads, but no one has ever commented on a similar problem. Until this thread. So I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, I've just anticipated it would come up for someone else eventually. If not in this case, just my 2c.
• Hold Shift in OpenCore while launching macOS.
The free utility Onyx from Titanium SW also can clean various caches. Get the version appropriate for Sonoma. Study its options.
A common reason for Finder stalls is a full drive—not necessarily the boot drive.
Also a failing drive.
After a system install, Spotlight indexing can make the system unresponsive, e.g., beachball.
BTW— beachball always means the system is waiting for I/O that's taking a long time, either due to overload or storage failure. There are many ways a system can overload. The system works based on virtual memory, where RAM may be backed by space on the boot drive, so problems with the boot drive can affect the central functioning of the system in many ways. But certain app behaviors can also tip it over.
While these are traditional issues for any OS and may appear at any time...
The original post asked if there is anything special with Sonoma, and included mention of at least one live system backup connected. This reminded me of problems I've had, beginning with macOS releases that rely on APFS Signed System Volume (so since Big Sur) where a full system backup attached by USB would spontaneously cause the Finder to hang. By sheer luck I discovered this was related to user APFS snapshots added via CCC backups (CCC's default behavior replacing SafetyNet for APFS user-data-only backups).
As a total aside, I've mentioned this experience in a few past threads, but no one has ever commented on a similar problem. Until this thread. So I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, I've just anticipated it would come up for someone else eventually. If not in this case, just my 2c.
