10.6.4: Repeated hangs and beach balls even with light use

I've got a 15" MBP, 2.53 GHz / 4 GB, with a 5400 rpm HD from summer of 2009.

Right now, I have Firefox 3.6.6 open with four tabs (none of them have Flash content), Preview.app open with a several-page PDF, the most recent iTunes running, and I'm downloading about 500 kb/sec worth of data.

Without playing music in iTunes, everything's fine. But whenever I click play, I get a whole bunch of small hangs in system performance, including the pain-in-the- "beach ball of patience", and the occasional audio stutter. This is totally unacceptable to me, and I certainly never had this issue on previous non-Apple laptops I had with equivalent hardware.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to what could cause this, and how I might go about fixing it?

 

Sounds like iTunes had a bad pre-install.

Either that or you have a bad hard drive.

Does the problem happen when iTunes isn't open?

 

is the whole process fine if firefox is closed?
Just making sure because firefox 3.6 is said to have huge memory leaks.
So the problem might be firefox itself. Try experimenting the process with Safari or chrome.

 

No other issues save for the occasional complaint-worthy Flash performance on OS X, and it's something I've seen only when playing music in iTunes.

Oh, and Azn, will give that a try.

 

I used to use firefox (3.6) and it hangs alot even without itunes or any other apps on my mbp so im just using Safari now and its alot smoother and faster.

 

Really? My experience has been the exact opposite. I like Safari 5, but it's stuttered far more than FF ever has for me.

 

Are you using smartscroll?
It has improved my browser experienced by alot.

On another note, do u have istat menus installed or any other cpu usage monitor to find what application is causing the hangs?

You can also give Google Chrome a try, its the fastest browser i've ever used. Although it doesn't have as many functions as firefox

 

No, I'm not -- tried it stock first, and then with a couple of other plugins, but not that one.

And no, haven't resorted to using istat / the activity monitor, largely because it always seems like iTunes is the one becoming unresponsive.

I love Google Chrome, but I've not been using it because of its relatively poor inline PDF handling (though it's admittedly getting better with the recent dev channel addition).

 

I've also had a lot of issues lately with browsers being open concurrently with other programs (both firefox and safari), even with no flash content running. I didn't have these issues on my windows partition (when I had it), and I don't have them on any of my other computers (even my netbook).

 

If iTunes is really the problem:
Have you tried all the standard fixing procedures?

Remove all iTunes and iPod files from Prefs and Prefs/ByHost.
Repair drive.
Repair permissions.
Run the daily, weekly, and monthly crontabs.
Delete caches and reboot.

 

Late reply... but I will say that it seems that carrying over my library files (maintained since... I don't know, iTunes 7? Early iTunes 8? Whatever it was) had gotten to the point where it was degrading performance somehow.

Finally decided to bite the bullet, completely remove everything as suggested by AznFlamer according to Apple's instructions, reinstall iTunes 9.2.1, and re-import my entire library using iTunes's import function instead of moving stuff to its directory. Took awhile, and it seems some of the MP3s didn't correctly have the artwork embedded in the ID3 v2.x tag, but that was easily fixed. Converted every single track to ID3 v2.3 for good measure (also took awhile for several thousands of songs), and playback has been great.