Aral Balkan

I've had my Mac appear to run out of resources a couple of times now and I can't narrow it down to find exactly what is causing it:

I usually notice that this is happening when it refuses to Command-Tab between applications. The task switcher just doesn't come up. It feels like there are no resources left to draw it. None of the open applications will draw menus, or other dialogs, either.

I just had it happen again and FireFox crashed with the following error:

NSInternalInconsistencyException: Error (1007) creating CGSWindow

As far as I can tell, the error seems to back up my observation that either something is causing the window server to fail or the Mac is somehow running out of resources. I've got 4GB RAM and over 175GB of free space on the hard drive so I have a hard time believing that it really is a resource issue.

This time around, I only had TextMate, Twhirl, QuickSilver, and FireFox running when this happened. QuickSilver seems to have crashed, and I shut down Twhirl and restarted FireFox and things seem to be back to normal now. I wonder if one of those three are somehow responsible. At the end of the day, though, this points to a bug with the window server itself as no single application should be able to take affect the whole system like that.

I've had this happen to me on my older MacBook Pro and also on my latest one (unibody).

Have you run into this at all? If so, please leave a comment detailing your experiences. Maybe together we can track down the cause and submit a comprehensive bug report to Apple.

Related reports from around the web:

• From: http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=9233: The Error (1007) creating CGS Window is something I have seen far too much of on Leopard when using memory intensive apps (e.g. RapidWeaver often fails to publish for me with this error message - my site is very large and uses a lot of RAM to publish). I suspect it is an OS bug rather than an app specific one, but it is incredibly annoying when it occurs. If you check out all the messages in console do you also start to see lots of malloc errors around the same time? That has been another symptom I have seen when this error occurs.

Comments

• It happened to me 5 or 6 times. It normally happened when running many applications and "switching apps quickly using command-tab", I would say. Most of the times what happened to me is that I click on command-tab, the app switcher is visualised, but the application is not switched and I cannot do anything else. As it happens to Louis, all the applications seem to be running nicely in background it's just the screen that is not updated anymore. Of course, I am also unable to start any application, or rather, I have no clue if it is actually started. :) I have not found any solution other than cold-rebooting.

  by Andrea Trasatti on 2009-01-11 16:50:17

• Perhaps check your firefox plugins, on it's own it's not too bad but with a multitude of plugins each gobbling resources it can be a pig. Try disabling them all then adding them back one by one to find the culprits.

  by Adam on 2009-01-09 12:29:31

• An issue I've seen is where there are so many zombie processes, no new processes can be started. A quick look for zombies with Terminal is: `ps x | grep Z`. You can use Activity Monitor in hierarchical view to find the process spawning these zombies.

  by Mark Wubben on 2009-01-09 11:56:42

• I've had this start occurring this week, also 4gb RAM here (only 3.2 addressable), I put it down to Flash CS4 due to some 30 very large bitmaps on stage at once but Firefox was open at the same time and it has recently been updated along with some add-ons updating. However this machine is 26 months old, I've never had a computer last this long without any noticeable slowdown (apart from the last couple of days) even though I generally don't reboot. Firefox has been unexpectedly bombing without reason recently, and looking at my Console I can see Photoshop CS4 and Flash CS4 have been positively spamming the log with the error that is usually followed by the error you report, "CGSResolveShmemReference" - "reference offset exceeds bounds". It is also happening for lower memory footprint apps like Skype, but probably for that reason it's less frequent. This post (last message) explains a related command-tab crash problem and a possible fix, rebulding the launchservices database: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1553093

  by Richard Leggett on 2009-01-09 13:22:42

• Firefox 3 causes regular problems on my macbook (osx 10.4). It's slow, uses a hell of a lot of memory and regularly hangs when quitting - Firefox stops responding after the browser window closes and the CPU fan starts to whir like mad. Fortunately I can still command-tab to the finder and force quit Firefox. My workaround has been to use Safari for web browsing and only start up Firefox when I need to use firebug. I don't know if that's of any use, but I'd suspect Firefox as the cause of your problems.

  by Jim O'Donnell on 2009-01-09 12:06:02

• Maybe it's time to upgrade your mac and get a PC?

  by Adam on 2009-01-09 11:44:14

• Firefox gets really greedy with memory on a PC, I suspect it might do the same on a mac.

  by John Cotterell on 2009-01-09 10:47:11

• It's probably unrelated, but look in Activity Monitor and see if iCal Helper is running. If it is, check its memory use. I've been having issues lately where it'll take over all free RAM and cause the computer to be nearly unresponsive. I believe it is related to the system clock being reset, but not 100%.

  by John B on 2009-01-09 14:32:20

• last week I had this happy to me on my new macbook pro (2.8 Ghz / 4 GB of RAM / 320 GB HD). I lost the ability to do command + tab, could not use exposé or any of the mouse gestures, and could not shutdown my machine. So I had to hold the power button to reboot my machine. Ironically enough all my programs seemed to be running perfectly fine. It was mostly just plain annoying not being able to command + tab. and I haven't had the problem again.

  by Louis Muloka on 2009-01-09 15:18:55

• And I thought these problems only existed in PC land. Maybe Vista (which I use) isn't looking so bad after all... Out of curiosity (as I am interested in making the switch) is everything else running as you think it should be on the system? Obviously having the system become totally unresponsive is bad news, but am wondering whether there's other little things that are bugging you on what would be quite an expensive system.

  by Jason Langdon on 2009-01-10 12:53:02

• Its a Mac, step away from the Kool-Aid ;). Hey if you do find the issue. make sure to post on non-Apple boards. Don't want it to disappear next time they make an update and think its a non-issue. Unfortunately agree, grepping is probably best. Activity monitor really does not reveal enough.

  by KM on 2009-01-11 03:29:08