iMac Beach Balls/Not Responding with 11.32r2

Question

Hi folks,

Until recently (last week), I've been happily running the current versions of X-Plane without any issues.

Yesterday, I suddenly noticed I'm getting a lot of "Unresponsive" alerts and Beach Balls, along with a missing mouse cursor. At that time, I was on the current release version. I upgraded to the latest beta and I have the same issue.

I tried deleting all plug-ins and all preferences. Same problem.

I installed a fresh copy into a new directory. Same problem - even on that opening screen.

I have noticed that if I leave it several minutes upon launch, I eventually get the mouse pointer back. Frame rates are high (50+), but if, for example, I use the right-button on the mouse to pan around, it'll briefly pause maybe every second or so, for a second or so.

I'm on a late 2015 iMac with 24Gb RAM running Mojave.

As I say, no issues prior to last week. I had installed a new app on the Mac for AirPod switching - I removed that just in case, and same X-Plane issue.

Also, it's not just whilst flying. I get the Beach Ball even on the Menu when the application first loads.

I’ve checked the disk health and all looks well  

Any thoughts or ideas?

No issues with any other applications on the iMac. No excessive load on the system according to iStats.

I’ve checked the log and no errors or failures shown.

Regards,

Mark

Answer 1

Hi Mark

I'm not with Laminar Research, just a fellow simmer in the UK, but as you are probably well aware, there could be a number of possible reasons why you may be seeing these 'beachballs' on your iMac, usually because the hardware can't handle the software tasks in hand:-

Whilst I recognise that you have been running X-Plane 11 successfully before (not sure which iteration of X-Plane 11 you had?), it is a very system hungry application so it would be worth double checking your full system specification against Laminar's 'minimum' and 'recommended' requirements:- https://www.x-plane.com/kb/x-plane-11-system-requirements/

I have looked at the specifications of most 2015 iMac models and they all appear to have just 2GB of GDDR5 video memory, which is borderline when it comes to running X-Plane 11.

I'm not sure which CPU you have, but if it's less than 3GHz, this again is borderline! As far as RAM is concerned @ 24GB, this appears to be more than enough and I also assume that your HDD will more than up to the task @ possibly 1TB?

You may wish to try benchmarking your PC online at:- https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Software. It's a free download that tests all of your PC's hardware and provides an online report for you to read, as per the screen prints below.

Sorry I can't be of more help :-(

Regards

   

Comments

Hi.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this.

However, it's not a performance issue. The sim was running absolutely fine one day, and not the next. Same version, same hardware. I know it's not there with the big guns hardware wise, but I was getting rock-steady performance at all times. And then one day it just stopped.

I've done a hardware test and all is well with the iMac. I'm at a loss to explain it. The only thing I can think of is I've inadvertently installed something that X-Plane doesn't like.

I've done a PRAM and SMC reset. I've done a RAM check. I've run the Apple diagnostics. No issues found anywhere.

When I get a chance, I'll boot from another drive with a clean install of OSX and see if that helps.

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Hi again

Would it be possible for you to upload your X-Plane 11 Log.txt file to this post so that I and others with a broader knowledge base can review it accordingly?

Regards

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Hi - it's all okay now. Reinstalled OSX and it works fine, so I must've introduced something to the OS that X-Plane didn't like.

Might be worth noting for future reference that this spec iMac is absolutely fine for X-Plane at Medium/High settings. Mac's seem to offer better than expected performance with X-Plane than equivalently spec'd Windows machines.

I'm getting terrific performance from the sim now the OS has been sorted.

Vendor supplied requirements never tell the whole story