thanks for that interesting story
just my 2c:
i'm using powerbook g4 17inch with leopard.8
i have seen if the powerbook is not shut down from time to time it
gets slower & slower because the log file updating takes more
time......so a shutdown every 4 days could be of help
James
SAD Technic
Video Productions, Electronic repairs
U3 / 6 Chalkley Pl
Bayswater WA 6053
+618 9370 5307,+618 6262 5707, 0414 421 132
http://www.iinet.net.au/~saddas
skype: barleeway
over 40 years in electronics
On 05/09/2010, at 14:55, Rob Phillips wrote:
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
-- 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:[email protected]>
