Performance hit... big time!

C

cwhaley

Registered
Hi...

I'm new here, but hope to take advantage of the collective wisdom.

First, it was iCal. I'd type in a few characters of a new entry and then have to watch the rolling beach ball for 2-3 minutes before I could finish my entry. After that, evrything was back to normal wrt additional entries and activities.

Now, it's happening in Mail. 5-10 minutes of rolling beach ball to delete just one email!!! And, in this case the problem doesn't go away. Same story for the next email I want to delete. With the amount of spam I get, I can't put up with this.

I've done the usual stuff re: rebuilding mailboxes, but that hasn't helped one bit.

I admit that I save a lot of email, but my inbox used to be 3 times larger and there was no performance hit like I'm experiencing now.

Help, please!

...charles
 
In order to get to the bottom of this, you'll need to open up /Applications/Utilities.

I would start by first running a Verify/Repair on the disk using Disk Utility.

Then, run the Activity Monitor and see if there are any applications using memory or resources that seem unusual or out of place.

Next, open up the Console and check for any unusual error messages that might explain the slowdown.
 
I would try disabling Spotlight and see if that helps;

Using the mdutil command-line utility in Terminal, turn off indexing for each of your drives. Example:

• $ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1
• $ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_2

2) Then use mdutil to remove the indexes from each drive

• $ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1
• $ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_2
•
3) Physically remove the .Spotlight directories from the root of each drive.

• $ cd /
• $ sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100
(do the same for your second or third drive)

Make sure to carefully type the "rm" command -- a typo could result in deletion of critical files.

4) Use mdutil again to turn indexing back on for each drive

• $ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1
• $ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_2

5) Spotlight will now re-index all drives and should behave in a normal fashion. (No longer uses 60%-80% of your CPU)
Click to expand...

Before turning it back on, run the machine for awhile and see how it is.
 
After running the utilities and fixing a few permissions etc., I also ran TechTool for a more thorough analysis/repair. Still no success, so I'm going to try the Spotlight solution.

I'm nervous about this since I know nothing about Unix and stay away from Terminal most of the time.

Before I start I'd like clarification on some points...

First, why run the procedure on all drives? My apps are all on my start-up drive, which naturally also has the OS. My two external drives mainly hold files, backups, etc etc

In #3, where is the reference to the hard drive name? Do I substitute my drive names for "V100"?

Otherwise, it looks straightforward.

Thanks in advance for further help on understanding this.

...Charles
 
I would turn it off for all drives myself so nothing is being indexed.

'sudo rm -rv /Volumes/old drive/.Spotlight-V100'

Substitute your drive name for "old drive"
 
I'm not sure I've solved my problem, but if I have I'd still like an opinion or two on just what I've done.

First of all, after running through the Spotlight routine, I was still having major slowdowns with simple Mail tasks.

Then I went back to the Utilities recommendations again, and noticed something that I missed the first time. In the Activity Monitor I found something called "python" that was using 30-40% of my CPU even when everything else was idle. That's an appopriate name for something that chokes off your CPU!

As soon as I quit that process I could literally hear my iMac's hard drive slowing down. It went from howling like a banshee to deathly quiet, but everything still seems to be working.

With a bit of research, the only reference I could find to "python" is a programming language, which I obviously don't use. However, it looks like some python files are on my hard drive in a developer area.

Could this be the same python that whacked my CPU? If so, I can't imagine what actual program could be running that is accessing it.

My next step will be to reboot and see if it comes back. If it does, and I suspect it will, any advice on killing this snake?

...Charles

BTW On the Spotlight front, I discovered a great little shareware utility called Spotless which is a slightly more elegant way of turning Spotlight on and off selectively across different drives, than using Terminal.

And, finally, when I checked the Console, the most frequent error message throughout the log was...

2007-01-23 19:59:26.196 SyndicationAgent[2116] WARNING: BestCalendarDateFromString - can't interpret: 'Tue 23 Jan 2007 14:36:35 -800'

...over and over again. Could there be any realtionship to the earlier stuff I mentioned?
 
Python is a scripting language. A powerful development tool indeed.
But as has been said, "With great power, comes great responsibility."

Or words to that effect...

Did you installed any applications shortly before this slowdown started?
It's possible that a programmer did not take into account some problem that Python is struggling to overcome.

Check startup items if the problem returns.
 
Thanks a bunch!

Unfortunately, I'm one of those guys who's constantly downloading freeware, shareware, bets, etc., then not getting rid of them after finding that they're not for me.

In this case the culprit appears to have been SoonR -- a beta app that runs in the background to allow you access to your Mac from your cell phone. Sounds good in principle, but not if it takes over your machine. I couldn't even trash the app without killing the process first in Activity Monitor.

Anyway, I've learned a lot from going through this whole process. Thanks to everyone for offering advice!!!

...Charles
 
Ooops... I spoke too soon.

Python has come back to grab about 30-40% of my CPU again. I can't see anything else in my start-up items that could be using python, and it's strange that it's only choking my performance when I'm doing stuff in Mail. I can switch to another app and not see any degradation there.

Any further thoughts anyone?
 
"Plugins?" is close. After removing every Python app I could find on my hard drive, I finally tracked down JunkMatcher in the App Support folder in the Library. I apparently installed it about 3 months ago, and promptly forgot it was there. I didn't know it was a Python app in the first place.

It's a spam filter that is tightly integrated with Mail and normally does a good job. But it apparently suddenly chokes when it hits a limit of 100 item in your "whitelist".

According to...

http://junkmatcher.sourceforge.net/Howto/Troubleshooting/index.html#WhitelistGroupLimit

... there's a limit of 100 on some aspect of Python which is critical to JunkMatcher. There's a workaround on that page, which amounts to reducing the number of whitelist items. That kind of defeats part of the purpose of the application, but the solutions works. Python no longer strangles my Mail.
 
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