Hi Chris, That will do it. You helped me getting started in terminal some time ago, and yes I've become somewhat comfortable there now. Compared to dos using braille, I'm still dealing with some inconveniences, but I learned many things, and something again today. The first time I tried your hint, I got loads of error messages, illegal operation. And of course, I forgot the sudo prefix, despite your clear instruction. Hmm. But the second time it worked like a charm. I don't know what dmworker is, but again I now have something to go after. Thanks. Paul. On Dec 11, 2012, at 5:15 PM, Chris Blouch <[email protected]> wrote:
> For me the usual culprit is Time Machine which does a backup each hour and > makes things sludgy when it is running. I've also heard that the 'mds' > process is Spotlight indexing the hard drive and that can slow things down. > Another problem is if you get low on memory the OS will swap pages of memory > that haven't been used recently out to disk to free up more space. Then when > you go back to an app that used those pages of memory the OS will swap them > back in. So if you're low on RAM there can be a lot of page swapping or > thrashing which can bring any system to a crawl. Activity monitor only shows > processes by CPU use, not by disk activity, but sometimes those correlate. If > you're ok with playing around in terminal you can do > > sudo iotop 10 1 > > sudo is "super user do" because this command can only be run by the root > account, so it should prompt for your administrator password. iotop is like > activity monitor but for disk activity. The first number is how many seconds > to sample. The second number is how many samples to do. If you leave the > second number off it will keep doing 10 second samples until you stop it > running with control-C. You should get a 9 column output with spaces between > each value. The last column is the number of bytes read by the process during > the sample period with the process with the highest byte count last. You can > do a "man iotop" for more details. > > CB > > On 12/11/12 10:45 AM, Paul Erkens wrote: >> Dear listers, >> >> My hard disk is working constantly, without me knowing what the heck it's >> doing. To my knowledge, I don't have disk intensive background stuff >> deliberately turned on. I know I'll have to get this from activity monitor, >> but I don't know how to find the info I'm looking for. No matter how I sort >> the table of processes, new ones are added all the time, while others get >> removed, and so it is hard to focus on items inside the processes table with >> voiceover. How do you deal with this? I.e.: finding out which process is >> using the hard disk so intensively that it's getting hard to do work in the >> foreground? >> >> Paul. >> > > -- > ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
