Strange Finder and OS behaviour and some resolutions

[Rob Phillips]

Hi all I've been having strange performance issues with my MacBook Pro over the last 4 months.  2.5 GHz core 2 duo, 2Gb RAM.  OS 10.6.4.  There were and are, multiple symptoms and causes.  I'm writing this to assist other people who might experience similar problems, and seek advice about my ongoing issues. I wrote the start of this email in July: "Ever since I had Snow Leopard and Office 2008 installed in May the machine has been having periods of CPU thrashing.  This lasts for about 5 mins and then settles down.  During the CPU thrashing response times are obviously VERY slow.  I can see that both CPUs are working at near 100% each thru iStat menus. It's a bit confusing.  A couple of weeks ago the logic board died, and I got a replacement, and nothing has changed. I've repaired permissions and repaired the System disk with Disk Utility.  By using Console, I was able to locate and remove a rogue Lexmark printing process from a printer I used when visiting someone." Sometimes after periods of thrashing, the machine becomes unresponsive, and I need to restart it.  Sometimes the machine restarts, but the finder doesn't function.  Ronda Brown suggested that I reboot off another drive, trash  the Finder Prefs ~user/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist and reboot.  This worked.  She also advised that I install the 10.6.4 Combo OS update. The machine was still thrashing, and I was suspecting that it was a virtual memory thing.  However, my system disk had 40GB free (about 20%).  There should have been plenty of room for virtual memory swap files. I did some searching on the web and found Mac OSX Routine Maintenance by Randy B. Singer http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html. One part of that article was about disk defragmentation. The standard OSX 'wisdom' is that OSX automatically defragments disks.  It is true that OSX handles file fragmentation, where parts of files are on different parts of the disk.  It doesn't handle drive fragmentation, where files are spread all over the disk, and there isn't enough contiguous space left for swap files, etc.  This was the cause of my CPU thrashing.  When I installed Snow Leopard and Office 2008 they filled up the free contiguous space, and the removed old Leopard files left various gaps. I used iDefrag (http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php - GBP 20) and this fixed up my CPU thrashing problems.  In the meantime, I have had another logic board die, but this has been fixed. However, the system keeps slowing down and becoming unresponsive, and the Finder Prefs keep becoming corrupt, often after unresponsive periods. The CPU's don't thrash any more, but it can take 5-20 seconds to swap between apps. I regularly check for disk and permissions errors, and it all seems OK. One scenario which can start the unresponsiveness is when I'm doing backups.  I use a program called Synchronize to backup to an external disk, and Time Machine over wireless. When one of both of these are running, the machine runs like treacle. Is there any way I can allocate fewer system resources to these backup tasks? What might cause the Finder corruptions? I am still trying to work out a foolproof way to recover from the finder corruptions. Booting off another disk, trashing the Finder Prefs and rebooting isn't enough to fix it anymore. I installed the unix utility Applejack. http://sourceforge.net/projects/applejack/files/AppleJack/AppleJack-1.6/AppleJack-1.6.dmg/download. This fixes system software problems from single user mode.  Hold down Apple(Command)-S when the system boots.  Last week when the Finder was corrupted and it wouldn't reboot after trashing the finder prefs, I ran Applejack AUTO to do a deep cache clean.  It then started up OK. Today, when the Finder was corrupted and it wouldn't reboot after trashing the finder prefs, applejack didn't work, but a Shutdown rather than a Reboot did. I hope these troubleshooting processes might be helpful to those with mid-level technical skills, and I'd really appreciate any suggestions about how to get around the finder corruptions.  It takes me an hour or 2 to fix these each time. Cheers Rob -- Associate Professor Rob Phillips Educational Development Unit Room 4.42 Level 4 Library North Wing, Murdoch University r.phill...@murdoch.edu.au Phone: +61 8 9360 6054 Mobile: 0416 065 054 Fellow, Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>