Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Reggie Fowler · Jun 29, 2005, 08:08 PM

i've had this happen on 2 different computers, but the OS starts running really slow. One machine i did a clean install and that solved the problem.....but now another machine is acting up.

anyone have similar experiences?

Since EBCDIC · Jun 29, 2005, 09:09 PM

I notice that Tiger gets slow when I leave it for a while. It's as though everything gets swapped out and it takes a bit of effort to bring everything back into memory. Everything is slow: reacting to the brighter/dimmer switches, command-tab thru apps, everything. It's really annoying.

G-mac · Jun 30, 2005, 01:59 AM

I've been experiencing massive slow down as well. I've tried all the basic fixes, but no improvement. I'm running 10.4.1 on a MDD 1.25 - never had the slow down issue with Panther. Basically, I'm seeing the beachball more frequently with the simplest actions: opening a folder, clicking on a web link, dragging windows.

I guess it's time to do an archive and install.

Will this really solve the slow down I'm experiencing?

Chuckit · Jun 30, 2005, 02:32 AM

Does everyone really see this? If it's happening on a Dual 2.5 GHz G5, it should be able to happen to anybody. But either my mind is just very slow anyway or I'm not seeing this. Are any of y'all running any background programs (say, APE or Butler) or plug-ins? Maybe something's behavior has changed.

Oh, and how long is "a while" for you guys?

Reggie Fowler · Jun 30, 2005, 06:11 AM

no background apps. I i turn my computer off every night. Not sure what's causing this.

Grrr · Jun 30, 2005, 06:12 AM

Running 10.4.1 on 2 different Macs here.. Never saw this happen until I was down to my last 200mb or so of HD space.. Tiger was extremely slow then, and gave all the symptoms described above.

CatOne · Jun 30, 2005, 10:39 AM

Originally Posted by Reggie Fowler

i've had this happen on 2 different computers, but the OS starts running really slow. One machine i did a clean install and that solved the problem.....but now another machine is acting up.

anyone have similar experiences?

So have you checked via top or activity monitor to see if something is hogging cpu?

BigBadWolf · Jun 30, 2005, 10:51 AM

I have the same thing happening on my powerbook running tiger. I find that it happens especially when I leave my computer connected to a self-refreshing websight in Safari and go into my screen saver. But it also happens at random, with no applications running.

Millennium · Jun 30, 2005, 10:57 AM

Originally Posted by Reggie Fowler

no background apps. I i turn my computer off every night. Not sure what's causing this.

Actually, that could be it, or at least part of it. OSX has many built-in maintenance routines which it uses to keep itself in top condition, but it runs them late at night so that they don't interfere with most people's normal work. If you turn the machine off, these routines don't get the chance to run.

That said, there are ways around this. I've always been a fan of the Unix daemon anacron, which checks periodically to make sure the routines were run and runs them if they weren't. It neither has nor needs any GUI or config options; you just install it and forget it. However, if you go this route then you need to be careful to get the Tiger version of it. Tiger made a lot of under-the-hood changes which keep anacron from working (it doesn't hurt anything, but it doesn't do anything either). An updated version is out there, but you need to be sure to use it.

The Tiger version of anacron can be found here.

cambro · Jun 30, 2005, 02:21 PM

As CatOne says, when you are having this problem, open activity monitor to see what is consuming resources.

I've found that the process mds sometimes hogs a bunch of CPU cycles on my PB. I think that this process is for Spotlight indexing, but the web is full of information on it if you find that to be the problem.

Also, try logging out when you get slow downs. Clearly this isn't a very good solution, but it often works.

G-mac · Jun 30, 2005, 02:37 PM

I recently checked my SysStat widget and noticed that 'vshieldcheck" was taking up over 90% of my CPU at all times. I did a quick check and realized that Virex 7.5 was causing this. Apparently, Virex 7.5 is not compatible with Tiger although the older version 7.2 still is. Needless to say, I uninstalled Virex. Hopefully, this will solve some, if not all, of the slowdown.

I'll keep you posted.

Millennium · Jun 30, 2005, 02:50 PM

Originally Posted by Grrr

Running 10.4.1 on 2 different Macs here.. Never saw this happen until I was down to my last 200mb or so of HD space.. Tiger was extremely slow then, and gave all the symptoms described above.

How big is your hard drive supposed to be?

You're right that Tiger gets very grumpy if you don't have a lot of free space on your hard drive. This has actually been true for all versions of OSX, and even Windows has some trouble with this as well. It has to do with how virtual memory works. Linux gets around the problem by putting its swap space on a different partition, and in OS9 you could turn virtual memory off completely (though this usually wasn't a good idea, unless you were doing real-time audio processing).

It's a good rule of thumb to keep at least 10% of your main hard drive -whichever one you boot from- free at all times. It doesn't matter so much with other drives.

Chuckit · Jun 30, 2005, 02:56 PM

You're begging to get screwed if you let your free drive space go lower than 1 GB.

Since EBCDIC · Jun 30, 2005, 02:59 PM

Getting back to this very busy thread, I want to say that my TiPB is *never* turned off, has loads of free disk space, and I DiskWarrior it every two weeks (so it's not some process trying to write to disk and running down a broken rat-hole).

I've noticed two kinds of complaints re: Tiger. The first is beachballing. I notice this when I have some CPU-heavy task running, especially BitTorrent or XFactor.

The second is this slowness-upon-waking symptom. It seems that one busy app (perhaps BitTorrent 4.0.x) in use with everything quiescent results in too much being swapped out (that is to say, too much RAM being handed over to the busy app). Once I tab through my apps, and a bit of each is brought in, and the OS brings in what it needs, then my Tiger is quite happy. But the first ten or fifteen seconds after waking are useless, and longer if I just pick one app and wait, wait, wait.

Since EBCDIC · 03:04 AM

You're begging to get screwed if you let your free drive space go lower than 1 GB.

That's not really true. Mac OS X can safely run with almost no free space, say 200-300 MB. It'll be slower, as it pages almost everything out, and it will warn you about it, but that's about it. Hardly "screwed". (You won't lose data, corrupt your disk, or anything else serious. You'll just go slowly. I've even - inadvertently - gone down to 0 MB free and have had Tiger limp along until I noticed and freed up space (by copying to an external FireWire drive).)

Please don't be alarmist unnecessarily.

Chuckit · Jun 30, 2005, 10:39 PM

In every case of running out of room I've seen, preferences have been messed up in an insane way. And in many cases, there has been data corruption too (perhaps because of inconsistent preferences?).

But besides that, when I said "screwed," it was in the context of "Will this make my computer go slower?" So I was saying, "Yes, it will go a hell of a lot slower." I phrased it that way because it is almost unusably slow, and as I said, I've seen other big problems come about because of it, so I felt it was worth a strong warning.

Hal Itosis · 04:06 AM

Originally Posted by Since EBCDIC

That's not really true. Mac OS X can safely run with almost no free space, say 200-300 MB. It'll be slower, as it pages almost everything out, and it will warn you about it, but that's about it. Hardly "screwed". (You won't lose data, corrupt your disk, or anything else serious. You'll just go slowly. I've even - inadvertently - gone down to 0 MB free and have had Tiger limp along until I noticed and freed up space (by copying to an external FireWire drive).)Please don't be alarmist unnecessarily.

My heart goes out to anyone who -- after reading
that -- then blindly follows such PISS-POOR advice.

Mac OS Standard or Extended?
Disk Full resulted in lost preferences

Since EBCDIC · Jul 1, 2005, 04:20 AM

I'm not sure you actually know what the word "advice" means, as none was being given. That's called anecdotal evidence. If you will bother to go back and read what I said, you'll notice that I freed up space when I noticed. I think we all understand that running deliberately with almost no free space on our startup volumes is sub-optimal :-)

The links to which you point are worthwhile reading, but they don't actually tell us anything new. It's somewhat obvious that if you have no free space then files can't be written. Hence the "lost preferences". It's not clear that any disk corruption will occur.

So, I say again (to spoon-feed those who need it): you can run Mac OS X with very little free space, but you will suffer performance issues, some of your apps will be unable to work since they may need more space to save their interim states. You probably will want to free up some room from your startup volume, and certainly try to do so when the OS tell you to. And don't freak out if you've let your disk get full by inattention. Tidy it up and move on.

siflippant · Jul 1, 2005, 05:05 AM

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis

My heart goes out to anyone who -- after reading
that -- then blindly follows such PISS-POOR advice.

Mac OS Standard or Extended?
Disk Full resulted in lost preferences

Chuckit · Jul 1, 2005, 09:47 AM

Originally Posted by Since EBCDIC

The links to which you point are worthwhile reading, but they don't actually tell us anything new. It's somewhat obvious that if you have no free space then files can't be written. Hence the "lost preferences". It's not clear that any disk corruption will occur.

Those links explain exactly how disk corruption could occur in this case. And again, as I said, I have seen exactly that happen on numerous occasions (though not every time, which may be why you were lucky).

CatOne · Jul 1, 2005, 07:21 PM

Originally Posted by Since EBCDIC

I'm not sure you actually know what the word "advice" means, as none was being given. That's called anecdotal evidence. If you will bother to go back and read what I said, you'll notice that I freed up space when I noticed. I think we all understand that running deliberately with almost no free space on our startup volumes is sub-optimal :-)

The links to which you point are worthwhile reading, but they don't actually tell us anything new. It's somewhat obvious that if you have no free space then files can't be written. Hence the "lost preferences". It's not clear that any disk corruption will occur.

So, I say again (to spoon-feed those who need it): you can run Mac OS X with very little free space, but you will suffer performance issues, some of your apps will be unable to work since they may need more space to save their interim states. You probably will want to free up some room from your startup volume, and certainly try to do so when the OS tell you to. And don't freak out if you've let your disk get full by inattention. Tidy it up and move on.

Wrong. Running with the disk near full IS dangerous. Posit this:

If you get a page fault, and the OS needs to write a memory page to disk, and the disk is FULL (or, I should say, if the free space on the disk is less than the page size), what happens?

I'll give you a hint, Wheel of Fortune Style: K*RN*L P*N*C. And likely data loss.

Don't do it. If you run out of disk, bad things will happen. 200 MB is DEFINITELY trouble-city, as it's less than the amount of RAM in nearly every system these days.

Since EBCDIC · Jul 1, 2005, 09:58 PM

Posit what you wish. It doesn't change the fact that OS designers aren't the idiots you seem to want them to be.

For all the times you've run out of disk space on your boot volume (I guess it's happened to me about two dozen times since Mac OS X was released) how many times has it been followed by corruption or kernel panic? (For me, none.)

The OS just isn't that fragile. When I was involved in testing these OS issues in PenPoint (a pen-based OS running on keyboard-less IBM ThinkPads in the early 1990s) the OS took a lot of abuse before crapping out. It's not a house of cards.

So I'll say it AGAIN since some of you just don't seem to have particularly special reading comprehension: you can run Mac OS X with very little free space, but you will suffer performance issues, some of your apps will be unable to work since they may need more space to save their interim states. You probably will want to free up some room from your startup volume, and certainly try to do so when the OS tell you to. And don't freak out if you've let your disk get full by inattention. Tidy it up and move on.

Chuckit · Jul 2, 2005, 01:10 AM

Originally Posted by Since EBCDIC

Posit what you wish. It doesn't change the fact that OS designers aren't the idiots you seem to want them to be.

For all the times you've run out of disk space on your boot volume (I guess it's happened to me about two dozen times since Mac OS X was released) how many times has it been followed by corruption or kernel panic? (For me, none.)

For me, about nine out of 10 have hosed prefs, and slightly fewer (maybe seven out of 10) have resulted in a messed up file system catalog. And I say this as someone who admins a school lab as well as a small business where many people think like you until I explain to them why their computer is acting so erratic all of a sudden.

Tell me, what do you reckon these smart OS designers do if they need to write data to disk but you haven't left them any room? If the kernel tries to write to the disk, you get possible data corruption; if the kernel abstains from writing to the disk when it needs to in order to operate, you get a kernel panic. What other option are you positing?

eddiecatflap · Jul 2, 2005, 02:05 AM

my sister's powerbook ran out of hd space and we had SERIOUS problems with it

we had to quickly delete as much stuff as possible and reinstall the os , it was scary stuff

timmerk · Jul 4, 2005, 03:40 PM

Tiger is bloated and buggy. It sucks.

Person Man · Jul 5, 2005, 07:28 AM

Originally Posted by timmerk

Tiger is bloated and buggy. It sucks.

Quit spamming each thread!

eddiecatflap · Jul 5, 2005, 09:01 AM

yeah , i wouldn't say it completely sucks , it just needs the rough edges chipped off

some dashboard and spotlight options and a finder that searches when YOU decide , not as fast as possible and then slowing down like treacle as the system grinds to a halt

Keda · Jul 5, 2005, 09:51 AM

Tiger is one of the worst performing OSX iterations on all of my Macs. My 867 12" is brought to its knees on a regular basis (1-2 minutes of nothing F'n happening) and my dual 2.5 G5 has unexplainable lags that last for 1+ minutes at a time. I have no idea what is going on, but I am REALLY hoping 10.4.2 fixes things.