10.1.3... running like a snail.

boi

boi

official breaker of macs.
it seems my cpu usage is always above 80%. everything is running dog slow, it takes forever to open apps.
it didn't happen right after 10.1.3, but some time after installing it.
i fsck'ed it a billion times, (started out with like 12 errors), but there are still 3 errors that will not go away no matter how many times it's fscked. i don't remember the exact errors.
anyone know of any way i can clean out my system and speed this bugger back up?
imac DV 600, cd-rw.

[ boi™ ]
 
Check out what processes are eating your CPU cycles using the terminal's top command or by using Apple's ProcessViewer utility.

If it's not anything you need that is taking up all the CPU, then try killing that process and see what happens.
 
if you're running at 80% - its not the OS to blame really - you must have some weird program or process ruining things for you. like the others have said, pinpoint what exactly is running up so much of your processor power, and then either get back to us, or get rid of the program (or fix what's making it run so wacky).
 
I've recently been experiencing some serious lag on my system as well. After installing a few apps (maya, DVD 3.1.1, etc) I have had the following problems:

The system 'kept' a CD and wouldn't give it back. Pressing eject resulted in a lockup of anything I tried to open, as well as finder. Couldn't apl-shift-Q to logout. Had to force shutdown.

Logging out takes > 1 minute, beachball and all.
Boot takes > 3 minutes.
Logging in took 3 minutes this morning.

All of this on a G4 800 iMac.

I just left myself logged in this morning, and brought up the screensaver with a lock because logging in/out is so painful. But I tested the unlock and it takes 15-20 seconds to bring up the unlock dialog. I'm going to investigate further tonight, perhaps rolling new things like maya off of my system, and rebuilding the library caches, etc.
 
I 'm encountering quite the same than anrkngl, except that I didn't install any "big" apps since i upgrade to 10.1.3.

'specially, the log phases are really long, not to log out, but to return to the login window (or to call it in case of boot), and then to log itself. I had problems with my dsl, and I thougt it was related to. But these problems are solved now and it still carry on.
Itunes, Toast and the eject button also work strange sometimes. Toast dosn't recognize the eject button while it is preparing to burn, iTunes freeze a little, and refuse to give me back the hand while it's asking tracknames to cddb.
Classic is still fragile, also. Sometimes, the menu bar is blank, I have to quit and re-launch the app. It happens only when I launch the first app, the one who launch Classic.
It doesn't slow "really" my dual800, but it's annoying.
 
Haha, you guys crack me up. I'm so jealous of your startup times. It takes me > 6 minutes to boot up to login prompt [sometimes as much as 10], and then another 3-4 minutes until everything is loaded up. Starting up IE is about 65 bounces. All this on a 01 iBook dual USB, 384M, stock 10Gigger. I posted earlier about woes, tried a reinstall, no change. Ran extensive hardware testing, no problems. Monitored the system to death with top, nothing out of the ordinary. I just got used to it being sluggish and slow I guess. Also, does anyone's "Optimizing for your computer" during software installs take ~20 minutes? What exactly is it "optimizing" here?
 
The "optimizing" thing is running the UNIX update_prebinding routine, which links apps to the dynamic libraries that they need to access. It basically should make apps run a bit faster.
Uncle, you have serious performance issues going on. With a 10-gig HD, you may be in need of a defragmenting. Or better yet, initialize the HD and reinstall OS X. You will be amazed at the improvement!
:D
 
Yeah, I bit the bullet last night and bought PlusOptimizer [ would have bought DiskWarrior too, but didn't want to wait for the CD just to get PlusOptimizer]. The graph of my drive was pretty horrendous...I also turned colors down to thousands, enabled window buffer compression, did the prebinding trick, turned off lots of effects on the Dock, and even did the DNS cacheing from the HOWTO. I haven't tried it since, but, I'd imagine, with the state of my drive, that it will be a tremendous improvement. Still, it's rather worrisome that after only two months of use, the drive reached this state of fragmentation (and there's no Apple supplied utility to fix it!!) Maybe it's time for Apple to implement a new filesystem...


** UPDATE **
Startup time wasn't helped much, lots of odd errors, so maybe I should look into backing up and reinstalling OSX. But anyway, it's now 7 bounces to start IE (first time start), which, is a tremendous improvement from the previous 65!!
 
I have a beige g3, and 10.1.3 is running like a snail on it as well.

I removed the ATI Rage Orion video card I had in it (running with the internal Mach64 video) and all the sudden, runs like a charm!

The task which was using all the CPU time (made the 'system' in 'top' like 80-100%, right?) was the kernel_thread, which is not a good sign.

What apple needs to do is issue a kernel patch for computers with ATI Rage Orion graphics cards, and similar ones.

(BTW, I removed my USB/Firewire card, disabled internal video, etc. Its definitely my ATI Rage Orion)

So, I ask you all this:
What graphics chipsets do you guys have?

I'll post the interesting output of `dmesg` at the end of this post (type dmesg in the terminal, and paste the interesting video-related stuff):
Code: 
VSLNewInterruptService('vbl ')
fails with -18
86008000: VRAM found 86000000:01000000
.Display_Rage128: i2cPower 0
.Display_Rage128 EDID Version 1.0
Vendor/product 0xe11/0x346, Est:  0xa9, 0x9e, 0x00,
Std:  0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101, 0x0101,
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:86008000 size:300080
.Display_Rage128: using (1024x768@75Hz,32 bpp)
 
Hello all,

well after using dmesg I got a bunch of output. can anyone make sense of these errors? what does "failed with -18" mean? I have edited the output of dmesag -- just leaving in mainly the things pertaining to the 2 monitors I have.

I have noticed that logouts and shutdowns can sometimes take awhile for me but not as long as some people have posted in this thread (This was not happening in 10.1.2).

I have also noticed that after using my Mac for awhile things will start to slow down. I'll do 'top' in the terminal and quit anything that is not needrd or using up processing power (however I rarely ever see processing usage consistently above 50% for any application). This slowing of the system was also noticed on pre 10.1.3 versions.

G4 AGP/400 832MB 10.1.3

--------------------


able_max_displ = 64
\^[[31mC\^[[32mO\^[[33mL\^[[34mO\^[[35mR\^[[0m video console at 0x94008000 (1152x870x8)
IOKit Component Version 5.3:
Thu Jan 24 21:53:23 PST 2002; root(rcbuilder):RELEASE_PPC/iokit/RELEASE
_cppInit done
IODeviceTreeSupport done


VSLNewInterruptService('vbl ')
fails with -18
96008000: VRAM found 96000000:01000000
.Display_Rage128: i2cPower 0
.Display_Rage128 EDID Version 1.1
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:96008000 size:3d2c80
.Display_Rage128: using (1152x870@75Hz,32 bpp)
VSLNewInterruptService('vbl ')
fails with -18
86008000: VRAM found 86000000:01000000
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:86008000 size:1e9680
.Display_Rage128: using (1152x870@75Hz,16 bpp)
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:96008000 size:3d2c80
.Display_Rage128: using (1152x870@75Hz,32 bpp)
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:86008000 size:1e9680
.Display_Rage128: using (1152x870@75Hz,16 bpp)
ether_ifattach called for en
ipfw_load
IP packet filtering initialized, divert enabled, rule-based forwarding enabled, default to accept, logging disabled
Root power domain receiving initial preferences
ApplePMUInterface::setAggressiveness - sending restart VIA command
ApplePMUInterface::pmuCommandGateCaller - restarting VIA interface
enable_filters: SIP_PROTO_ENABLE -already set flags=29
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:96008000 size:1e9680
.Display_Rage128: using (1152x870@75Hz,16 bpp)
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:86008000 size:1e9680
.Display_Rage128: using (1152x870@75Hz,16 bpp)
.Display_Rage128: user ranges num:1 start:96008000 size:1e9680
.Display_Rage128: using (1152x870@75Hz,16 bpp)
 
VSLNewInterruptService('vbl ')
fails with -18
Click to expand...

Well, I can tell you what it probably is, but not how to fix it :eek:
You're getting an I/O System Error while trying to set an interrupt to handle the video card's Vertical Blanking [the 'vbl' part]. Your error, -18 is I believe a statusErr. Which would mean something like the driver for your card isn't responding to a request for status (I think). But, if the card displays fine, at the resolution you want, I probably wouldn't worry about it too much. It's also probably not the cause for your slowdown. But I could just have my head up my ass, in which case, someone feel free to rebuke me.

You say you get degraded performance the longer the macs been running, so, a more useful log to look at would be /var/log/system.log Is there anything suspicious in there? Look for repeated attempts failing. Or something that gets logged over and over and over.

**
I know the log gets big- a useful command, if you don't know unix much, would be "tail", ie try "tail -n 50 /var/log/system.log" to check out the bottom 50 lines of the file.
 
interesting, I'm getting the -18 error too. The card works fine, but the entire computer is slow as can be.

my performance doesn't degrade though... its consistantly sucky when the card is in, and when I remove it, its consistantly speedy.

Time to write apple!

Oh, btw, to eject optical media:
disktool -o
 
Originally posted by kilowatt
...
Oh, btw, to eject optical media:
disktool -o
Click to expand...

Hey, that's much better than hdiutil eject <disk>. disktool sure has some interesting error messages, try a strings /usr/sbin/disktool when bored, and note the first few messages...
 
strings
very cool command blb! I'm going to have to string all my commands now and see whats inside them!

sure beats greping a binary file!
 
Just talked with someone who has an iMac DV SE (400). He has an ATI Rage 128 too, and he gets the same "VSLNewInterruptService ('VBL') Fails with -18"

BUT,

10.1.3 runs fine for him

So it may not be 100% related to the VBL error

hmm more thought is required.
 
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