Many different things can cause performance issues in our apps. Most of the time, this behavior resolves itself and there’s nothing you need to do. If this behavior keeps happening or it prevents you from getting work done, we’ll need to investigate further to determine the cause.

Hangs

Sometimes you’ll see the colorful spinning pinwheel cursor, lovingly referred to as the beachball of death. We call this a hang, and it means the application is waiting on some other process to complete before ours can finish what it was doing. Though most hangs are temporary, it’s possible to get stuck in a never-ending spinning-beachball loop, and the only way out is to Force-Quit by pressing ⌥⌘⎋.

Before you force-quit, launch Activity Monitor.app and generate a Sample report (see below for a how-to).

App hangs at launch or when connecting to a server

By default, Transmit and Nova restore previous session data by automatically connecting to the server you were previously connected to last time you launched the app. In Nova’s case, it will automatically open any previous files you were working on as well. If the app hangs at launch or when connecting to a server, try holding the Shift Key (⇧) on your keyboard when launching the app or when double-clicking on a project in Nova’s launcher. This will prevent the app from opening data from a previous session, likely preventing the hang.

Fun fact: This shift key trick works with most Mac apps that restore session data– not just Panic apps. Cool!

App isn’t frozen, but sluggish

If one of our Mac apps is being sluggish or otherwise slow to react to your input, we need to know how you got the app into that state. Start by both rebooting your Mac and re-launching the app in question. When you’re back up, attempt to make the slowness happen again. If you can reproduce the behavior, great! Send us the details as well as a Sample from Activity monitor (see below for a how-to) and we’ll investigate. Please include a list of steps or a screen recording showing how you were able to reproduce the hang.

If things clear up after a reboot, you’re likely good to go.

Take a Sample and contact us

When experiencing a hang or other sluggishness, taking a Sample from Activity Monitor will generally tell us what’s happening, allowing us to diagnose and fix the issue. Here’s how to do that.

1. Launch Activity Monitor, which is an app located in your Utilities folder inside your Applications folder.
2. In Activity Monitor, you should see a list of all apps running on your Mac. Find the app that’s experiencing the issue and select it.
3. In Activity Monitor’s toolbar, click the gear icon, then Sample Process. Wait for this to complete.
4. In the sample result, you should see a large amount of text. Click the save button at the top right to save a copy.

Important: When taking the sample, try to make sure that the app in question is actually frozen (or being slow) when you click Sample Process otherwise the Sample report may not actually tell us what we need to know. Often times, it’s best to open Activity Monitor at the same time as Transmit or Nova so that you can quickly take the sample before the app un-freezes.

Once you’ve got your sample, email us and we’ll take a look. In your email, describe how to make the application go into a hang (or become slow), and attach the Sample report.