Originally posted by Magill
One thing to remember about OS X.... it is a REAL operating system. The old Mac OS was not much different than DOS -- it never quite got out of the way as DOS did when a program was running, but it did get most of itself out of the way, leaving the application program 100% of the CPU.
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OS X is a UNIX OS, with REAL multitasking.
<P>
OS X on the other hand, never gets out of the way when an application program is running. Also, there are "daemons" running all the time which never get out of the way. Just because you are the only one on your box running an application, doesn't mean that nothing else is happening. OS X really IS a "time sharing" operating system.
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Welcome to unix.
Dont like the idea that the daemons are useing so much CPU with out surendering tick's? renice them! man renice for more info.
ps aux | grep (whatever)
renice -p (pid of what ever) (new level of nicity {0 and less are real time, anything greater than 0 depends on how much cpu power they really get!}
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All this is just modern operating system theory. But it is a different model than the old Mac OS used!
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Modern OS theory? Since when is a OS first built in the 70's modern? (Granted, BSD isnt the first unix, but still).
<P>
There is a program called "top" which can be run in the terminal window. It is much better than Process Viewer (which is a poor imitation of top). Other than the fact that this version of top probably doesn't know about multi-processors, it's a good way to find out what is happening.
("CPU Monitor" in Applications/Utilites has a pull down which will launch top for you.)