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I am thinking that Mac OS X doesn't multitask so well. My wife has a Macbook Pro 17", about two models back, 2 GB RAM, running Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1 (one major rev before Leopard, whatever cat that is). I am running an rsync backup to an encrypted disk image on a USB disk. I have niced the rsync processes, limited the rsync bandwidth to 5000 KBytes limit (which I suppose I am not hitting). Currently the machine is also running Itunes, Mail, Firefox, X11 Openoffice, plus all the required stuff (Finder, Dashboard, etc.). Problem: Interactive performance is *terrible*. Running top, the idle is usually over 70%. Questions: 1) Am I trashing some key cache? (How can I avoid that? The rsync is running slowly enough as it is, but I can slow it down more...) 2) Am I thrashing the disk? (How do I read the mem usage in the Macintosh top? "wired"?, "active"?, "VM: 10.9G + 140M"? What does that mean?, is it really running a current 11Gs of swap?? I am running far more stuff on Ubuntu right now and I am using only 1 GB of swap with only 1 GB of RAM.) 3) This seems much worse than Linux, am I tricking myself? Is BSD/Darwin doing something stupid here?? Thanks, -kb, the Kent who is more and more impressed with his little Panasonic W4 sub-notebook every day. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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