Filed under: Odds and ends, Snow Leopard
Reports coming in of DST-related Snow Leopard issues
If you experienced some odd performance problems on your Snow Leopard-running Mac early this morning -- say, right around the time of the Daylight Saving 'fall back' to standard time -- you're apparently not alone. The Apple support boards are hopping with reports of 100% CPU spikes coinciding with the switchover from DST between 1 am and 2 am, mostly associated with having the menu bar clock enabled and/or having the clock automatic set feature turned on.
Thanks to Gordian and everyone who sent this in.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Grayson said 11:29AM on 11-01-2009
Haha wow i thought my mac was going crazy! This exact thing happened to me too!
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Jordan said 1:22PM on 11-01-2009
No problems here, Windows 7 updated my time just perfectly
Aerospeed said 9:20PM on 11-01-2009
♫ They see me trollin'... ♫
Average White Boy said 1:00AM on 11-02-2009
Sounds like a whole bunch of hooey to me. The menu bar clock taking over the whole system. Yeah, I bet that happened to ten people in the entire world. I suppose when the new year change takes place the Mac will turn into a pumpkin. Where do people make up these crazy rumors?
Jordan said 8:35AM on 11-02-2009
@AWB: Well there seems to be more than ten people on this blog alone that had the issue. Count in all the people who don't come here that are using a Mac, and man I bet that's quite a large number.
Didou said 11:29AM on 11-01-2009
We changed time here in Belgium a couple of days ago & I didn't notice a CPU spike at the time but for the whole hour after the change, the clock was stuck on 2:00AM. An hour later it went straight to 3:00AM & from there on it updated by the minute as it's supposed to.
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roro4869 said 11:29AM on 11-01-2009
lol I was in bed, so haven't noticed that yet.
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Marcus Heller said 11:33AM on 11-01-2009
I didn't notice it on my Mac at the time, but my friend's Xbox 360 froze and the latency went skyrocketing on a Doom iPhone match my friends and I were having, all at the same time. We assumed voodoo was at hand..!
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[TheBORG] said 11:36AM on 11-01-2009
I was out drinking. All normal since I've been up.
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Darwin Smith said 11:49AM on 11-01-2009
No problems here. Was watching Hulu when the time changed and didn't see any spike.
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MisterSquared said 1:35PM on 11-01-2009
That's because Flash was already using all of your CPU processes ;P
tukan said 11:49AM on 11-01-2009
yup, same story here - SystemUIServer was hogging the CPU for quite some time - I knew it was menubar related but the clock?!? WTF? are we in for the same story in the fall?
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spencercal said 11:58AM on 11-01-2009
I was using my computer during the time change running snow leopard, and not a problem… I was even encoding video at the time and didn't see anything odd happen. I have menu meters installed, and never saw them go crazy either…. Guess it wasn't everyone…. Macbook Pro 2007
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Mike said 12:05PM on 11-01-2009
Huh. I noticed this this morning when I woke up in the middle of the night, right around 2 AM. I just closed the lid and decided to worry about it in the morning, but it was all fine when I opened it up.
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Mikey P said 12:16PM on 11-01-2009
"The workaround is apparently simple (if it hasn't already resolved itself after the cutover to DST); just turn off the menu bar clock in System Preferences for a moment, and the problem should go away."
Not just a moment. Turning off the clock until 2 am (1 hour after the changeover) worked.
Unacceptable (and at first glance, careless) bug by Apple. They need to fix this before Spring.
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Joseph Soto said 12:25PM on 11-01-2009
Same thing happend to me except it caused my computer to completly hang up and freeze. After a hard reset I came back to not being able to locate the system file. Tried to do a repair on the disk and that failed. Tried restoring from back up and that only partially worked. Now reinstalling Snow Leopard and will try restoring files manually...
Posted from my iPhone.
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seeegs said 12:29PM on 11-01-2009
Weird. I blacked out for 137 seconds and saw 6 months into my future.
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chase.reuter said 12:32PM on 11-01-2009
Yeah, I had this same problem. I've read that waiting till 2:00am fixed it but I personally disable then enabled the clock and it was fine. Though, I did do this at 2:00am, so I'm not sure which actually fixed it. Weirdest bug ever.
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Jordan said 12:47PM on 11-01-2009
Wow, more Apple bugs and more fanbois completely passing them off as nothing. For $30 Apple sure created a lot of problems for Leopard 2.0
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robogobo said 1:36PM on 11-01-2009
you must be real proud of yourself.