Tired of the beach ball and not knowing what’s going on behind the scenes? If you’re system isn’t locked, you can figure out a call stack by bringing up the activity monitor and sample the application process.
You can find the Activity Monitor in the Application -> Utilities folder ( shift – cmd – u from the desktop as a keyboard shortcut).
Once you launch the Activity Monitor, you’ll see a list of process filtered by the drop down in the upper right hand side. Within the list, find the process that is hung (which should be in red letters), highlight it, and then hit the Sample Process button.
Usually with hangs, you may want to take more than one sample of the call stack as it may take several in order to show what’s going on.
Here’s a screenshot of a sample call stack of a functioning application ( note: in this case, the application isn’t hanging. And yes, you can take samples of the application that isn’t hung as well. 🙂 ) :
With a sample of the call stack while hung, it may help you or the developer get more information in order to reproduce the issue.