Calendar App Keeps Spinning Mac OS X
Calendar App Keeps Spinning Free On Your

In the pie charts shown in these panes, more green is better.

Officially, its called the Spinning Wait Cursor or the Spinning Disc Pointer.

Colloquially, it goes by many names, including the Spinning Beach Ball.

Whatever you call it, the colorful pinwheel that replaces your mouse cursor is not a welcome sight.

According to Apples Human Interface Guidelines, the spinning wait cursor is displayed automatically by the window server when an application cannot handle all of the events it receives.

If an application does not respond for about 2 to 4 seconds, the spinning wait cursor appears.

Calendar App Keeps Spinning Mac OS X

WindowServer is the background process that runs the Mac OS X graphical user interface.) Which is to say, the beachball is there to tell you your Mac is too busy with a task to respond normally.

When it doesnt go away, it turns into what some call the Spinning Beach Ball of Death (also known as the SBBOD or the Marble of Doom).

At times like those, it helps to know why the thing appears and what you can do to make it go away.

The most basic reason the beach ball appears is because your Macs hardware cant handle the software task at hand.

Its not unusual to see the occasional beach ball when you Mac is performing complex computing tasks.

Even everyday activitiessuch as syncing with iTunescan temporarily overtax the CPU.

To find out if the CPU is a bottleneck on performance, use Activity Monitor (ApplicationsUtilities) to monitor CPU usage.

You dont have to keep an Activity Monitor window open all the time; there are less obtrusive ways to use it.

For example, open Activity Monitor then Control-click on its Dock icon and select Dock Icon - Show CPU Usage.

You can also Control-click on the icon and select Monitors - CPU Usage, or Monitors - Floating CPU Window.

That will place a small activity graph in the corner of your screen.

Insufficient RAM means more paging and swapping, which means fewer CPU cycles are available to apps.

If apps cant get the CPU time they want, the beach ball appears.

Thats why you want as much RAM as your budget will allow and your Mac can accommodate.

Similarly, if your startup disk is nearly full, less space is available for swap files.

Calendar App Keeps Spinning Free On Your

As a rule of thumb, keep at least 10GB free on your startup disk.

Again, you can use Activity Monitor to diagnose RAM and hard drive shortages; open the System Memory or Disk Usage tabs.

Calendar App For Mac Keeps Spinning