Now: the script was over and it looked like it finished its job successfully (OK -- I had no serious error handling...). I did a top, and I could not see any suspicious looking process. Still, the computer was very very slow. I had to reboot -- it also took a while to reboot, but now it is working fine again.
When this happens I always do a quick
ls -l /var/vm
and see what's in there. That's where OS X keeps its swap files, and if there are a lot of them its a sign that the system's taking up rather a lot of memory. (They get automatically cleaned up when they're empty) Even if they're mostly empty, there seems to be a lot of overhead in having them.
Sometimes if you find the processes that have a lot of VM allocated (large VSZ in a "ps aux") you can kill them off and find things get snappier, but that doesn't help if it's a system process. Some of those seem to get larger as you continue to do odd things to them. (The window server process seems prone to this when used with X, as the X servers all seem to have resource tracking leakage issues, though killing off X will usually free up most of the memory)
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
