[reader50]

... Ranks were taking longer, for no obvious reason. Other programs often caused excessive load in 'top', but with plenty of idle CPU. In time, it became obvious that all the programs with this behavior involved HD access. So, reboot into another partition, repair the several disk errors, then defrag.



Yes, it was time to defrag. Even when the partition was only 61% full. It had briefly reached 91.5% before I got it down again.

- insert defragging operation -

Three hours later. Ranks are threatening to finish before this post is done. Much better.

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by reader50:
... Ranks were taking longer, for no obvious reason. Other programs often caused excessive load in 'top', but with plenty of idle CPU. In time, it became obvious that all the programs with this behavior involved HD access. So, reboot into another partition, repair the several disk errors, then defrag.

Whoa, you defragged. I never do it on Mac OS X. What tool do you use? Doesn't look like Norton or Techtool, maybe Drive 10?

[reader50]

Drive10. Defragging isn't usually needed on HFS+, but when you've gone a long time between OS upgrades and been above 80% full, the rules change a bit.