application launching failures

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Dec 19, 2006, at 2:23 PM, Scott Ribe wrote:

>> it just froze with the
>> wallpaper showing until I held the on/off button down.
>
> How long? I've hit situations where it looked frozen and I decided  
> to wait
> it out just to see, and it did shutdown--I believe my record is  
> over 10
> minutes.

Probably 2 or 3 minutes.

One gripe with Mac laptops...no indicators of activity externally.  :-(

> Anyway, can you quit individual applications? I've seen this become  
> quite
> slow, but they do quit after a couple of minutes.

Yes, I can quit them, but they will not restart when this happens.

Logging off I can see one application after another close down until  
it's just wallpaper, at which point it just stopped doing anything.

> The reason I ask is that with the work I do, I have sometimes hit the
> default resource limit on number of processes per user. If this is  
> what is
> happening to you, then quitting an application or a few should be  
> enough
> that you can get a shell up and use ps to find out where all the  
> processes
> are--assuming of course that there's not something that's gone off  
> the deep
> end in the background and is spawning new processes faster than you  
> can
> start a shell.
>
> It might be worth your while to keep a shell open, just in case.

Does it take awhile to regain the resources to start processes  
again?  I quit some applications and it still sits there drooling at  
me :-(