Re: OT probably, help please
On Thu, 22 Jan 2015, William H. Magill wrote: After a tremendous amount of effort on the part of numerous kernel programmers at DEC, they discovered that the bottom level BSD I/O modules had not been looked at (literally) since PDP days. Disk I/O was being done in 128 byte blocks. You sure abut this? My memory of the PDP days (ye olde 11/40) was that I/O was the same as the disk sector i.e. 512 bytes; this was V5/V6/V7 Unix. One thing which I noticed immediately when I turned on iCloud disk in Yosemite -- the lag involved with launching any program which stored anything in the cloud. Not unexpected, but significant none the less. I've never bothered with iCloud; I don't store much stuff anyway (see my signature), and it all gets backed up to my Time Capsule. Similarly, I had a problem where my internal hard drive would literally not spin-up. Took the iMac in to the Apple Store and they ran their diagnostics and pronounced nothing wrong -- the tests passed with flying colors! I finally convinced them that the drive was not spinning up and they got a tech to come out front who had a stethoscope and instantly verified that the drive was not spinning. Didn't they see the dreaded question mark on booting up? I've seen too many cases related to both BSD (and later Mach, i.e. NeXT and OSX) where much of the hardware level stuff is completely ignored by any of the upper-level reporting software. -- one of the main reasons why Drive manufacturers developed S.M.A.R.T. -- the OS does not do the job. Hmmm... I just tried SMART on my drive, but being an external USB drive (long story) it's not supported, so... In my experience, by the time the OS flags a Disk error, you have been suffering constant performance degrading failures which are simply below the reporting threshold, for quite some time. I have been seeing slow performance lately; I bought the MacBook early in 2010, but it's a late 2009 model. I wonder? -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server. http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there) ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:29 AM, René J.V. rjvber...@gmail.com wrote: A bit too many reports of comparable symptoms in 10.9 somehow related to disk I/O errors for my comfort zone. OS X wouldn't be doing something low level that somehow stresses the disk hardware I hope? Just for one example (in the area of complex systems): HFS+'s hot file support is the sort of thing that can exacerbate failing disks... and the effect would get worse with certain kinds of changes to what files are hot, which might well cause it to become more evident in a newer OS version. And I don't think the right answer here is simplify because that just covers up the fact that it's failing, ensuring that when it becomes obvious again it'll be too late to save your data. (Yes, yes, have backups --- guess what? Backups will *also* make this more obvious. So do you also disable backups because they trigger disk errors?) -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonadhttp://sinenomine.net ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:29 AM, René J.V. rjvber...@gmail.com wrote: I wouldn't immediately think about disk i/o errors either from the symptoms you described (not for short freezes in anyway). Not with an hdd anyway. I would --- but that may be because I've seen it in action (most closely related to this thread: freezes like that led me to discover that the HD in my old iBook was kaput). -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonadhttp://sinenomine.net ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Thursday January 22 2015 09:40:28 Brandon Allbery wrote: Just for one example (in the area of complex systems): HFS+'s hot file support is the sort of thing that can exacerbate failing disks... and the effect would get worse with certain kinds of changes to what files are hot, which might well cause it to become more evident in a newer OS version. I don't know if the hot file feature is what I was thinking with low level operations, but yes, it is something that could exacerbate failing disk by concentration frequent read/writes on a specific part of the disk. again it'll be too late to save your data. (Yes, yes, have backups --- guess what? Backups will *also* make this more obvious. So do you also I guess you mean full backups which are a way of testing the entire set of sectors in use? disable backups because they trigger disk errors?) What did you think I was suggesting? I wasn't. I was asking. And yes, I do keep in mind that Apple has reasons to drive sales and incite people to buy new hardware and is probably not above tactics that decrease a product's theoretical lifetime. R. ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 11:02 AM, René J.V. rjvber...@gmail.com wrote: And yes, I do keep in mind that Apple has reasons to drive sales and incite people to buy new hardware and is probably not above tactics that decrease a product's theoretical lifetime. I think there are a lot of things one can do that can have the side effect of pushing the boundaries of hardware (this includes things like compression). Not to mention things like SSD where you are explicitly trading lifetime for performance. Searching for reasons to believe it's just to drive obsolescence isn't particularly fruitful, unless you consider paranoia an end in itself. -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonadhttp://sinenomine.net ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On 23 Jan 2015, at 12:42 am, William H. Magill mag...@mac.com wrote: I cannot explain why a (normally) rational, sane thinking idiot did not make that his first port of call (beautifully synced) Jan 21 00:04:34 haycorn kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error. Thanks everybody, and sorry for being an idiot I wouldn't immediately think about disk i/o errors either from the symptoms you described (not for short freezes in anyway). Not with an hdd anyway. What's in your logs around those I/O error messages, and what do the smartmontools (in MacPorts) tell about the disk's health? smartctl -a /dev/disk0 and do run smartctl -t long /dev/disk0 (disabling disk spin down for the duration of the test as that would interrupt it)? A bit too many reports of comparable symptoms in 10.9 somehow related to disk I/O errors for my comfort zone. OS X wouldn't be doing something low level that somehow stresses the disk hardware I hope? I confess to bias suspecting yosemite before anything else! smartctl -a gives zillions of errors eg SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000e 078 077 006Old_age Always - 183829319 3 Spin_Up_Time0x0003 100 100 000Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count0x0032 099 099 020Old_age Always - 1749 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 081 060 030Pre-fail Always - 147598082 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 078 078 000Old_age Always - 19827 10 Spin_Retry_Count0x0013 100 100 097Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 020Old_age Always - 1505 184 End-to-End_Error0x0032 100 100 099Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 001 001 000Old_age Always - 34330 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000Old_age Always - 0 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 099 099 000Old_age Always - 1 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 058 040 045Old_age Always In_the_past 42 (3 248 42 24 0) 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 042 060 000Old_age Always - 42 (0 16 0 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 038 025 000Old_age Always - 183829319 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000Old_age Always - 2 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000Old_age Offline - 2 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count0x003e 200 200 000Old_age Always - 0 James ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Friday January 23 2015 08:56:31 James Linder wrote: smartctl -a gives zillions of errors eg 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 081 060 030Pre-fail Always - 147598082 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 038 025 000Old_age Always - 183829319 A zillion is a bit over the top: I see only these 2 indicators that catch attention, but without knowing the disk model it's hard to interpret the data. port:gsmartcontrol can help with that, btw. Bad sectors aren't necessarily detected and recorded on the fly, though. I always forget if the get stored (and remapped) during the 1st extensive self-test after a full disk write or if it's the other way round (last time I had to cope with one was about 10y ago) but in your case a full rewrite may not be required as long as the disk doesn't spin down after the last error and the self test. Good luck, R. ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please (fwd)
Oops; this was meant foe the list... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server. http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there) -- Forwarded message -- Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 15:11:06 +1100 (EST) From: Dave Horsfall d...@horsfall.org To: René J.V. Bertin rjvber...@gmail.com Subject: Re: OT probably, help please Someone mentioned launchd.info (and I daftly deleted the message). Does it look as wonky for others as it does for me? I'm using Firefox 35.0 (haven't tried others, as the last time I did it buggered up a few things) and I get, in the top half, a static window with some sort of an index and a silhouette of something looking like a watering can, with a full-screen scrolling window under it. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server. http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there)___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 2:26 PM, René J.V. rjvber...@gmail.com wrote: Oh wait, but you're running FreeBSD on it ... O:-) I read MacBook with a FreeBSD *server*. I used to run that kind of setup myself (and am trying to scrounge hardware to do so again...). -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonadhttp://sinenomine.net ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Jan 22, 2015, at 4:29 AM, René J.V. Bertin rjvber...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday January 22 2015 08:56:25 James Linder wrote: I cannot explain why a (normally) rational, sane thinking idiot did not make that his first port of call (beautifully synced) Jan 21 00:04:34 haycorn kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error. Thanks everybody, and sorry for being an idiot I wouldn't immediately think about disk i/o errors either from the symptoms you described (not for short freezes in anyway). Not with an hdd anyway. What's in your logs around those I/O error messages, and what do the smartmontools (in MacPorts) tell about the disk's health? smartctl -a /dev/disk0 and do run smartctl -t long /dev/disk0 (disabling disk spin down for the duration of the test as that would interrupt it)? A bit too many reports of comparable symptoms in 10.9 somehow related to disk I/O errors for my comfort zone. OS X wouldn't be doing something low level that somehow stresses the disk hardware I hope? Long ago in the days of Ultrix, there were some massive parts of the low-level disk-i/o that never saw the light of day. (Ultrix from DEC being a direct BSD clone.) None of the hardware level routines were addressed by any of the accounting routines. Made performance look good, but debugging impossible. Performance was unexplaninedly lower than the new hardware predicted. After a tremendous amount of effort on the part of numerous kernel programmers at DEC, they discovered that the bottom level BSD I/O modules had not been looked at (literally) since PDP days. Disk I/O was being done in 128 byte blocks. The new hardware had 4096 byte tracks. Calculate how many I/Os were required to write a single track! Increasing the basic block size dramatically cut down on the number of I/Os and their consequent overhead - performance improvement was dramatic. One thing which I noticed immediately when I turned on iCloud disk in Yosemite -- the lag involved with launching any program which stored anything in the cloud. Not unexpected, but significant none the less. Similarly, I had a problem where my internal hard drive would literally not spin-up. Took the iMac in to the Apple Store and they ran their diagnostics and pronounced nothing wrong -- the tests passed with flying colors! I finally convinced them that the drive was not spinning up and they got a tech to come out front who had a stethoscope and instantly verified that the drive was not spinning. I've seen too many cases related to both BSD (and later Mach, i.e. NeXT and OSX) where much of the hardware level stuff is completely ignored by any of the upper-level reporting software. -- one of the main reasons why Drive manufacturers developed S.M.A.R.T. -- the OS does not do the job. In my experience, by the time the OS flags a Disk error, you have been suffering constant performance degrading failures which are simply below the reporting threshold, for quite some time. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill mag...@icloud.com mag...@mac.com whmag...@gmail.com ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On 22 Jan 2015, at 4:00 am, macports-users-requ...@lists.macosforge.org wrote: change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then all is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection). firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 seconds before resuming Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while wheel is turning! system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning. What do you see in the system.log when (or after...) one of those wheelies? Do you have power napping and what have you active? Did you use a 10.10 public beta and upgrade to the release version without doing a clean install? I *hate* the app nap and sudden termination features that were introduced in 10.9 (it appears they actually experimented with app nap based on SIGSTOP/SIGCONT ...), and am not really glad with the memory compression features either. There's a defaults command to turn off app nap which I'd advise for anyone rarely if ever running off a battery, but I have no idea about tweaking that memory compression thing. And that's almost certainly bound to slow down operation in a more continuous fashion than traditional swap. I cannot explain why a (normally) rational, sane thinking idiot did not make that his first port of call (beatifully synced) Jan 21 00:04:34 haycorn kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error. Thanks everybody, and sorry for being an idiot James ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On 21 Jan 2015, at 2:38 pm, William H. Magill mag...@mac.com wrote: On Jan 20, 2015, at 10:28 PM, James Linder j...@tigger.ws wrote: G’day The other day I reported that gnuplot had suddenly stopped working with term x11 but worked with term aqua. Maybe it was just slow ! I have an issue where the system has (suddenly) become very slow … iMac 27 top:cpu free 99 ish % system-monitor also shows cpu cores at 0% busy men free 8G df 50 ish % yosemite change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then all is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection). firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 seconds before resuming Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while wheel is turning! system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning. This seems unrelated to macports. Time machine is on an external USB disk and scheduled to run now (another pause checks:TM disk definitly NOT busy) So before I nuke this install, any ideas gratefully acceped James ___ Sounds like issues with Anti-malware virus programs. The ones that insert themselves into your tcp/ip data stream to examine all of your traffic so that you don't' download bad stuff. I had to shut off thtat processing in Sophos because it had gotten so bad (i.e. taking FOREVER to load any program that talked to the internet.) That was a sudden change in how Sophos was working. At first I thought it was simply because I had turned on the iCloud drive (which does impact things). But after a lot of trial and no-luck turned off the option in Sophos. Long ago I had tried Avast! and discovered that it's anti-malware was simply horrible in what it did to a Mac. BSD and linux are pretty much of a muchness here. There are no malware or virus’ for either so I don’t do anti-virus, hence it’s not that. Thanks too to Jeremy it does not look like appnap stuff. (but it could be) The whole virus scenario is messy. It has been demonstrated as proof of concept. Apple’s forray into Konqueror oops I mean Safari is an example of how to do it wrong. You basically don’t need to protect your mac, but someone may find a weak spot. Will anti-virus save you? $1,000,000 question. Meanwhile I s-s-st-stu-stutter along debating nuking this whole install … James ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
OT probably, help please
G’day The other day I reported that gnuplot had suddenly stopped working with term x11 but worked with term aqua. Maybe it was just slow ! I have an issue where the system has (suddenly) become very slow … iMac 27 top:cpu free 99 ish % system-monitor also shows cpu cores at 0% busy men free 8G df 50 ish % yosemite change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then all is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection). firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 seconds before resuming Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while wheel is turning! system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning. This seems unrelated to macports. Time machine is on an external USB disk and scheduled to run now (another pause checks:TM disk definitly NOT busy) So before I nuke this install, any ideas gratefully acceped James ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
Re: OT probably, help please
On Jan 20, 2015, at 10:28 PM, James Linder j...@tigger.ws wrote: G’day The other day I reported that gnuplot had suddenly stopped working with term x11 but worked with term aqua. Maybe it was just slow ! I have an issue where the system has (suddenly) become very slow … iMac 27 top:cpu free 99 ish % system-monitor also shows cpu cores at 0% busy men free 8G df 50 ish % yosemite change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then all is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection). firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 seconds before resuming Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while wheel is turning! system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning. This seems unrelated to macports. Time machine is on an external USB disk and scheduled to run now (another pause checks:TM disk definitly NOT busy) So before I nuke this install, any ideas gratefully acceped James ___ Sounds like issues with Anti-malware virus programs. The ones that insert themselves into your tcp/ip data stream to examine all of your traffic so that you don't' download bad stuff. I had to shut off thtat processing in Sophos because it had gotten so bad (i.e. taking FOREVER to load any program that talked to the internet.) That was a sudden change in how Sophos was working. At first I thought it was simply because I had turned on the iCloud drive (which does impact things). But after a lot of trial and no-luck turned off the option in Sophos. Long ago I had tried Avast! and discovered that it's anti-malware was simply horrible in what it did to a Mac. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # iMac11,3 Core i7 [2.93GHz - 8 GB 1067MHz] OS X 10.10.1 # Macmini6,1 Intel Core i5 [2.5 Ghz - 4GB 1600MHz] OS X 10.10.1 OSX Server (now dead) mag...@icloud.com mag...@mac.com whmag...@gmail.com ___ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
