Customize your OS X clock and use it as a system lockup monitor

Written by: Scott Haneda on Wednesday April 16th 2008, 3:35 am

Filed under: Finder, Misc

It’s just a clock, how in the heck can it be used to tell you if your system is locked up? To be honest, it really can’t. However, I have used this tactic since way back in the OS 9 days, and it still works pretty darn well under OS X.

First I will start with the basics, customizing the clock, what you can change, and why you may want to. After a small history lesson in how OS 9 was not as smartly multi-threaded as OS X, I can then explain just how you can use your clock as a visual aid to tell you if your computer is stuck.

System clock customization
Unless you have moved your clock elsewhere, it should still be sitting in the upper right corner of your screen. If you click on it, you can select the last item in the list: Open Date & Time.

Once the Date & Time preference pane is open, you should see there are three “tabs” at the top. The first one, Date & Time, allows you to select if you want the clock to set itself automatically. You can also set the date here as well. As long as you have an Internet connection, OS X will poll what is called a time server every now and then. In most cases, you should never have to worry about your date or time being off by more than a few seconds.

The second tab in the Date & Time preference pane allows you to choose your time zone. This is important to do, as we all live in different time zones. Daylight Saving Time has been moved around a bit over the years; the time zone you pick, ensures you never have to think about setting your clock to do the “fall back” or “spring forward” routine.

And finally, the last tab is the Clock tab. And it is this area I will explain how to set in a certain way to help you determine system lock ups. The options here are pretty self-explanatory.

If you use the Analog clock, this tip is not going to be of much help to you.

The key here is to set it to “display the time with seconds”, or at the very least, “Flash the time separators”. Personally, I use both. At this point, just humor me and set your clock to show the seconds and the time separators, which will blink once a second.

A Brief History of Time
Long ago, before OS X, there was Apple OS 9 and earlier. OS 9 supported something called multi-threading. I can say the methods they used to support it were rather crafty, in the end though, less than ideal.

What this meant to a user was that you could do more than one thing at the same time. In real world use, multi-threading on OS 9 worked pretty good, but not perfectly. Using OS 9, you could forget about watching a movie while ripping an mp3. Some applications were written so poorly in this regard, just clicking and holding your mouse would freeze the entire system until you released the mouse.

Those days are long gone, but one of the side effects still remains. On OS 9, your clock would constantly lose time. Because the clock is an application of sorts, if another application got stuck in some way, the clock would get stuck. Over time, day-to-day use, you could lose a few minutes here and there. Not a big deal, because even OS 9 had the ability to reset the clock automatically by asking what the correct time is from a network time server.

Using a stalled clock to your advantage
While not nearly as often, nor as bad, OS X still suffers from the same stalling issues as OS 9. Certain applications can and will stall out your computer. Most of the time, it is for such a short period of time you will never notice. Further, the clock will again get auto reset to a network time server on a schedule.

A perfect example, one of my web servers, has been running for 134 days, in a logged out state; the clock is now 10 full minutes out of sync. Apparently network time servers are not polled on OS X when you are logged out.

Every now and then, my computer will lock up in some way. It could be a single application, or the entire system will freeze. Near all the time, I have mouse control, but I cannot seem to do anything else. Most of the time, I wait it out, and all returns to normal. It is just a badly written application that is stealing all the cycles from my computer, making it appear to be locked up.

And that is the key here, your machine only appears to be locked up, but you have no way of telling. Some of these stalls can last longer than I have patience. Most would reboot. Rebooting is bad because we all forget to save our data, and losing hours of work is no fun at all.

The trick here, if you can call it that, is to glance at your newly customized clock. If you see the seconds ticking by, or the time separator pulsing, more than likely, your machine is not locked up. Wait it out, and things should come back to normal.

If you look at your clock, and the seconds are not moving at all, your machine is locked up hard. You are, in 99% of the cases, going to need to reboot.

I know this seems rather trivial, but I have been using this tactic for years now. Mail.app is a known culprit, and will stall out for thirty seconds or more at times. I cannot switch from mail to another app, or force quit the application, as I am locked into this stall. I just look at the clock, notice the time is still ticking by, and know to at least wait it out.

It is sort of a last resort, but takes nothing more than a glance. At times, you may think your computer is frozen; the system clock is generally a very good indicator that your computer is still able to perform actions. The truth is any application that has constant animation to it is a good candidate to use as a tool like this. I find the system clock is always there, is one of Apple’s single most reliable system applications that provides, and has served me as a lock up detection tool for many years.

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