Tom Nelson is an engineer, programmer, network manager, and computer network and systems designer who has written for Other World Computing,and others.

Jessica Kormos is a writer and editor with 15 years experience writing articles, copy, and UX content for Tecca.com, Rosenfeld Media, and many others.

Once in a while, for no apparent reason, you may encounter the Spinning Pinwheel of Death (SPOD) on your Mac.

The Mac is trying to function, but nothing is happening, so the pinwheel keeps spinning and spinning.

Its more likely that a single application is stalled or frozen.

It appears when an app exceeds the Macs processing capability.

When the Spinning Wheel of Death frequently appears with more than one app, the available storage space and RAM become suspects.

You can stop the spinning wheel and get back to a smooth Mac experience using one of these fixes.

To determine whether the spinning wheel of death is the result of a single app, click off of it onto the Mac desktop and force quit the app.

Theres a good chance, though, that youll see the spinning pinwheel again with that app.

In OS X Yosemite or earlier, one of the first things to do when experiencing the spinning wheel with an app is to repair permissions to make sure the application and any associated files it needs have the correct permissions required to run.

If needed, add RAM to the Mac and expand the storage space with an external drive or a larger internal drive.

One of Apples processes, Spotlight indexing, can bring a Mac to its knees while it creates or rebuilds the Spotlight index.

Wait for the process to end, although it can take a long time if Spotlight is indexing a new drive, a clone you just made, or some other event that caused a significant change in the Macs data storage.

Look for processes with the names mds, mdworker, or mdimport.

These are part of the MetaData Server process used by the Spotlight app.

If any of these have a high percentage of CPU activitylarger than 20its likely Spotlight is updating its database.

The Dynamic Link Editor is a way for the Mac to load and link programs to shared libraries.

If the application delivering the spinning wheel uses a shared library of routinesmany applications use shared librariesthe Dynamic Link Editor keeps the application and shared library on speaking terms.

If the cache of data in the Dynamic Link Editor becomes corrupt, it causes the SPOD.

Outlook For Mac Is Slow