Sluggish iChat, Messages, Terminal, and Others in Mac OS X Lion

After about 60 days using my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Lion (10.7.3), I saw some sluggishness in some apps. At first, it was Messages (iChat replacement for Mountain Lion). It went unresponsive and displays the rainbow wheel for a few seconds, enough to annoy an impatient user.

Then, the same behavior happened in Terminal. This is where I realize the common behavior. You know, when you press delete on an empty prompt, you get a bell. The default is the audible bell. When I change it to the visual bell, sluggishness disappeared.

On Messages, I had the default sound effect setting when messages are received or sent.

Boy was I right. In the log /var/log/system.log there were a bunch of these:

May  3 22:30:57 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Actions: Couldn't create SystemSound from /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff
May  3 22:31:07 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Unable to find a sound action ID for /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff  errorResult: 268435460
May  3 22:31:07 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Actions: Couldn't create SystemSound from /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff
May  3 22:31:17 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Unable to find a sound action ID for /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff  errorResult: 268435460

These are when I tried to change the system bell using the System Preferences application.

May 11 01:45:55 adymac System Preferences[44495]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound
May 11 01:53:22 adymac System Preferences[44678]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound
May 11 01:58:20 adymac System Preferences[44678]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound
May 11 01:58:25 adymac System Preferences[44678]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound

And so I tried a lot of things, including logging out then in, inspecting the file permissions, and also ran the verify permission utility on the hard disk using Disk Utility. Nothing worked.

Finally, I saw that there was one process called coreaudiod

_coreaudiod    45197   0.0  0.1  2453172   5228   ??  Ss   Fri02AM   0:10.52 /usr/sbin/coreaudiod

And so I tried killing it:

$ sudo killall coreaudiod

And as expected, it respawned itself and all audio effects were now working. Sluggishness and the dreaded rainbow wheel are gone.

Googling after, I saw that people mentioned that this may be a bug, and killing coreaudiod is only a workaround not the solution.

Come to think of it, it also caused unnecessary delay when making screen shots using the Command-Shift-4 key combination.

I hope this can save you some time.

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