Thanks Dan,
None of the things you list hardly take any time during normal idle
periods though, and should therefore not lead to any noises.
The initial spotlight-indexing does work excessively on the hard disk
as it has to go through every file on the computer, but subsequent
indexing do not and happens every time you alter a file, not a while
later when you are idle. The file system optimization happens on the
fly and the daily/weekly/monthly tasks run at respectively 3:15, 5:30
and 5:30 am that is.
These tasks will run irrespectively if you are idle or not.
Defragmentation is done under certain circumstances, and very well
described at http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/
where Amit Singh does a great job explaining what happens. E.g.
On-the-fly Defragmentation
When a file is opened on an HFS+ volume, the following conditions
are tested:
If the file is less than 20 MB in size
If the file is not already busy
If the file is not read-only
If the file has more than eight extents
If the system has been up for at least three minutes
If all of the above conditions are satisfied, the file is relocated
-- it is defragmented on-the-fly.
The only thing that could potentially take a little time - and that
is theoretically - is the Hot File Clustering, whereby often used
files are moved to the "hot space" of a boot volume where access time
is lower than other places. But I have never seen evidence that this
should be take up excessive hard disk usage.
If you have any better evidence for your claim that the maintenance
tasks running in the background when the user is idle leads to
excessive hard drive usage, I would be pleased to learn about it.
Something that comes to my mind that works in the background now and
then are the Dashboard Widgets, and given that a lot of them work by
regularly fetching data from the internet and thereby writing the
disk could be a cause of the noise that Germain is hearing, and
likewise other applications that fetch data on a regular basis will
write to the hard disk and can make noise that way.
I would suggest that a very good help is to watch the Activity
Monitor found in the Utilities folder to see if any application is
working a lot during the noisy times.
Kind regards,
Kim
Den 23. nov 2005 kl. 17.34 skrev [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
At 12:56 AM +0100 11/22/2005, Kim Gammelgård wrote:
[bogus top posting corrected]
Den 21. nov 2005 kl. 20.26 skrev [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
OS X does various maintenance tasks in the background when you're
idle. One of those things is a defragmentation of the HDs -
which begins to occur more frequently as you use your machine
more and more.
That was an interesting notion. Are you sure that this is
something that really happens when you're idle? I have never heard
of it, so I would like a link or two to learn more ;-)
Or you could just go to the Apple kbase and do your own search.
Three main things happening behind you, from Apple...
1) File system optimization.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668
2) Daily/Weekly/Monthly maintenance tasks.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107388
and
3) Spotlight updating its indices.
Look in OS X Help for info.
THEN there are things that 3rd party products do...
- Dan.
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