optimum HD setup....

F

fonzarelli

Registered
...I was wondering if anyone out there could help me with this little annoying problem....I run a 400mHz G4 with os x 10.2.8. I have 448 mB's ram and use the stock 9 GB HD plus I recently purchased another 80 GB HD mainly for storing music. Now the problem I have is that while I store all the songs on the large HD and with all the RAM I have I still continously get these slow downs in the processor that are brutally obvious when I play music because it sporadically starts to interrupt the songs with it's processing. Even if I don't have anything else really open. I should figure that my system should be able to play back songs without interruption even if I was running other programs.

Currently I have the 80 GB HD partitioned with one running the applications (10 GB) and the other 70 GB for storing songs, socuments, etc. The 9 GB HD is partitioned as well with 5 Gb for spare and the other 4GB for OS 9.2 and misc. Can anyone give me ideas as to why this happens and how I coould configure my system so that it runs at the most ideal.

Thanks a ton.....
 
Are you getting any pageouts? Open the terminal and type top then hit return. I posted a copy of mine below with the location in red.

Code: 
Processes:  57 total, 3 running, 54 sleeping... 160 threads            18:47:56
Load Avg:  0.33, 0.24, 0.21     CPU usage:  6.1% user, 10.5% sys, 83.3% idle
SharedLibs: num =  107, resident = 25.9M code, 2.95M data, 9.55M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num =  7782, resident = 94.4M + 12.9M private, 84.9M shared
PhysMem:  63.0M wired,  125M active,  162M inactive,  350M used,  289M free
VM: 3.47G + 77.4M   21156(0) pageins, [color=red]0(0) pageouts[/color]
 
mdnky said:
Are you getting any pageouts? Open the terminal and type top then hit return. I posted a copy of mine below with the location in red.

Code: 
Processes:  57 total, 3 running, 54 sleeping... 160 threads            18:47:56
Load Avg:  0.33, 0.24, 0.21     CPU usage:  6.1% user, 10.5% sys, 83.3% idle
SharedLibs: num =  107, resident = 25.9M code, 2.95M data, 9.55M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num =  7782, resident = 94.4M + 12.9M private, 84.9M shared
PhysMem:  63.0M wired,  125M active,  162M inactive,  350M used,  289M free
VM: 3.47G + 77.4M   21156(0) pageins, [color=red]0(0) pageouts[/color]
Click to expand...

Well I don't know what the pageouts mean really but....I copied the info....

Processes: 48 total, 2 running, 46 sleeping... 136 threads 20:28:48
Load Avg: 0.65, 0.30, 0.16 CPU usage: 38.6% user, 8.8% sys, 52.6% idle
SharedLibs: num = 7, resident = 1.73M code, 148K data, 512K LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 4997, resident = 164M + 4.64M private, 64.8M shared
PhysMem: 49.3M wired, 212M active, 74.8M inactive, 336M used, 112M free
VM: 1.88G + 3.62M 61910(0) pageins, 109873(0) pageouts
 
So which partition is your OS X running? If it only on a 4 GB partition, then that would explain the enormous pageouts you get. Restart your system, and tell us how much free space you have on your boot partition, I bet it's much less than 1 GB, and probably less than 448 MB, which doesn't leave your system much room to move...
 
Looks like he's on the 10gb partion for X.

109873(0) pageouts...whew, that's a good deal of pageouts! How long has it been since your last reboot (from when you took that reading)?

Pageouts are basically a bad, nasty thing. The less you have, the happier you'll be <G>. Sorry...pageouts happen when the supply of real memory has been exhausted (i.e. you run out of ram). So, performance & pageouts don't play well together.

It shows you to have 74.8mb of inactive ram. Usually you want to have that number (inactive) be 20% to 25% (higher % is better) of the total amount of ram in your system so it won't require much in the way of pagein/pageout activity. You're at 16.5% to 17%. That should be measured under a normal load for you, BTW.

It might be a good idea to drop another chip in there regardless as it's pretty cheap for an extra 256 or 512 chip. Check out www.macsales.com for prices, they usually have good deals. If you can swing it, the 512 would be your best bet.

Since you have a second drive, I'd consider creating a dedicated swap partition on it, in the first area of the drive, then force OS X to use it. Supposedly you can get around a 25% increase in performance (when done with a separate drive) give or take a bit. When it's done on the same drive (those with only one, like iBook/PBs) it's more around a 15% increase.
 
DeltaMac said:
So which partition is your OS X running? If it only on a 4 GB partition, then that would explain the enormous pageouts you get. Restart your system, and tell us how much free space you have on your boot partition, I bet it's much less than 1 GB, and probably less than 448 MB, which doesn't leave your system much room to move...
Click to expand...

Hey DeltaMac, I did reboot and I still have 4.21 gB of HD space on my boot drive with OSX...so I think I have enough room for it to operate in....
 
mdnky said:
Looks like he's on the 10gb partion for X.

109873(0) pageouts...whew, that's a good deal of pageouts! How long has it been since your last reboot (from when you took that reading)?

Pageouts are basically a bad, nasty thing. The less you have, the happier you'll be <G>. Sorry...pageouts happen when the supply of real memory has been exhausted (i.e. you run out of ram). So, performance & pageouts don't play well together.

It shows you to have 74.8mb of inactive ram. Usually you want to have that number (inactive) be 20% to 25% (higher % is better) of the total amount of ram in your system so it won't require much in the way of pagein/pageout activity. You're at 16.5% to 17%. That should be measured under a normal load for you, BTW.

It might be a good idea to drop another chip in there regardless as it's pretty cheap for an extra 256 or 512 chip. Check out www.macsales.com for prices, they usually have good deals. If you can swing it, the 512 would be your best bet.

Since you have a second drive, I'd consider creating a dedicated swap partition on it, in the first area of the drive, then force OS X to use it. Supposedly you can get around a 25% increase in performance (when done with a separate drive) give or take a bit. When it's done on the same drive (those with only one, like iBook/PBs) it's more around a 15% increase.
Click to expand...

WoW thnks for all the info mdnky! I think I really need to fork over the extra bit for more RAM like you said....but I'm still a little confused with how I should configure my HD's. If you were to start from scratch how would you maximize what I have? I have a 80 gb HD and a 9 gb HD with os x 10.2.8 on one and os 9.2.2 on the other....thanks....
 
What do you mainly use your computer for?

Are you happy with the multi-partition setup, or would you rather have a few less partitions?

It kinda falls on personal preference. I've become more and more attached to less partitions lately. My iBook is a single drive, no partitions. The beige currently has a 7.5gb partition for OS X and the remaining as a files partition. Before 10.1, it had a 7gb OS X partition, 5gb OS 9 partition, 1gb scratch disk, and remaining to a files partition.
 
Hi mdnky

Im interested in finding out what all that Top info means, SharedLib; nums for example. Do you or anyone else know where I can get this (web site, book etc).

Cheers

eric
 
Try Apple Discussions:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106415&sessionID=anonymous|1149803&kbhost=kbase.info.apple.com%3a80%2f
 
I hope this could be usefull:
This document describes how best to use multiple disks and partitions for a Linux system. Although some of this text is Linux specific the general approach outlined here can be applied to many other multi tasking operating systems.
Click to expand...
Multi Partition System
::ha::
 
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