On Sun, Feb 15, 2004 at 09:56:40PM -0600, Kirk Strauser wrote: > I use Amanda to backup an iMac running Mac OS X (10.2). The backup runs > perfectly, but the machine is horribly unresponsive while tar is running, > both during the estimate and dump stages. Renice'ing the tar processes > doesn't seem to help, so I'm guessing that it might be an IDE DMA thing, > although I don't know my way around Mac hardware well enough to know. > > Has anyone else seen this, and hopefully found a way to lessen the impact?
Can you tell if it is cpu or i/o bound? For example, do you have "top" or some other utility to say if a high percent of cpu is being used and by what application(s)? Or might it be the IDE drive as you suggest. You might see a delay when switching to a different shell window (as things are brought back from swap space) are but then it seems to run pretty normal. If something like a big dd or cat takes most of the cpu, on Solaris that can be a quick and dirty indication that the IDE drive is not using DMA. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
