System halting/freezing often Mac OS 10.11.5

When I am browsing files in Finder inside oDrive synced folders I am getting many pinwheel/color wheel/beachballs and it’s really quite frustrating from a user experience. On my Desktop Mac with the same OS using Dropbox sync I have no issues at all. When I quit the oDrive application, the issue goes away, so I know it’s related to oDrive.
What can I do to help this problem?
Version prod 6149

Hi @georgewhittam,
Can you send a diagnostic from the odrive menu so I can take a look?

Can you also describe what you are seeing in more detail? Would it be possible to take a screen recording of the behavior? You can use Quicktime to do so:

I sent a diagnostics report just now.
Here is the screen recording, but note that it does not show the pinwheels because Mac hides it from screen capture utilities: https://www.odrive.com/s/aa29859d-70c1-4be2-9eb8-6b279917c986-58ad23a6

Thanks @georgewhittam. I appreciate you taking the time to make the video and accompanying commentary.

A few questions and things to try:

  • After odrive has been idle for a while (no activity in the odrive menu, and its been running for 30 minutes or so), do you still see the same behavior? Is the behavior persistent and constant once odrive is running?

  • If you disable the odrive Finder extension from “System Preferences”->“Extensions”, does the behavior go away? (odrive will try to reenabled the extension, so you will have a limited amount of time to test this). I will also be curious if there is any difference after it is toggled.

  • Do you notice any difference in behavior if you navigate a more collapsed structure in Finder? For example, drill into a small folder with only a few items and another subfolder with only a few items. Finder should only be showing a couple of things on the current window. Does the latency go away, or is it reduced at all?

  • Same behavior after idle for hours/days

  • As soon as the Finder Extension is turned off, behavior returns to normal

  • I don’t notice any difference if navigate a more collapsed structure.

Hi @georgewhittam,
I took a look at the diagnostics, but I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Unfortunately I have never seen this particular issue before. I spent some time today trying to reproduce this on a Yosemite 10.10.5 install like yours, but I never saw any beachballing.

Some additional questions:

  • I see you have a few things linked. Is the behavior the same in all of the linked account folders?
  • Is there anything of note about your setup (symlinks, additional sync clients, anti-virus, etc.)?
  • If you open the Mac console, do you see any log messages that may be relevant or repeating?
  • Do you notice any spikes in CPU when this occurs (looking at the activity monitor)?
  • You mentioned another computer. Have you tried odrive on that system to see if the same behavior occurs?

I see you have a few things linked. Is the behavior the same in all of the linked account folders?
-I don’t use any of those folders anymore. I am going to delete the links to be sure.
Is there anything of note about your setup (symlinks, additional sync clients, anti-virus, etc.)?

  • Symlinks? I use Crashplan for cloud backup and Google Photo sync. No anti-virus.
    If you open the Mac console, do you see any log messages that may be relevant or repeating?
  • What should I be looking for exactly?
    Do you notice any spikes in CPU when this occurs (looking at the activity monitor)?
  • No, I don’t.
    You mentioned another computer. Have you tried odrive on that system to see if the same behavior occurs?
    -No, I haven’t.

Hi @georgewhittam,

It is hard to say, exactly, since I haven’t seen this issue before. I imagine it would be something that shows when you trigger the beachballing, or something that is regularly repeating. It would probably relate to Finder in some way.

I would be curious to see if this occurs on your other system. Another thing to try would be to create a new user on the problem system and run odrive there, seeing if the same issue occurs. I have seen issues that were localized to the user profile, before, and it helps to narrow down the environmental factors that cause the issue.