[Trygve]

I have 2 encrypted disk images of 5GB each. When copying a large file between them (700MB or so), my system slows down to the point of being unuseable. In 10.3.8 there was no noticeable performance hit.

I can't even drag windows while it is copying in 10.4.3. This is on a 1.67GHz AlBook.

What is going on with Tiger - I am very sorry I upgraded from Panther.

[cmeisenzahl]

Hmm. by your Panther comment, I take it that this was working better when you had Panther, the same operations?

I would assume that the I/O would be blocking a lot when that much data is being transferred, and all the encryption/decryption on files that big would also be very expensive in terms of CPU time.

Chris

[Trygve]

It was working much better in Panther - like any other finder copy.

[TheSpaz]

Originally Posted by Trygve

It was working much better in Panther - like any other finder copy.

Tiger is great! Nobody else has ANY problems with it, it must be something you're doing wrong. </sarcasm>

[Big Mac]

Why don't you boot from an external drive with Panther on it and verify that this operation still works well there before indicting Tiger.

[Thinine]

Or try doing the same thing on another Tiger install (or another user account on the same machine) and see if that makes a difference.

[osxrules]

Originally Posted by cmeisenzahl

Hmm. by your Panther comment, I take it that this was working better when you had Panther, the same operations?

I would assume that the I/O would be blocking a lot when that much data is being transferred, and all the encryption/decryption on files that big would also be very expensive in terms of CPU time.

Chris

No, I do that all the time and it shouldn't slow the system to a crawl.

What it could be is if Spotlight is trying to index the drives at the time since it updates in real-time so maybe there is a problem there.

Check the Activity monitor and list by CPU usage to see what process uses most CPU during a copy. If something called mdimport or mds appear then that is most likely the problem. If so then drag the disk images to privacy in system prefs.

[Trygve]

I have disabled Spotlist for my secure disk images with:

sudo mdutil -i off "/Volumes/MySecureDisk"
sudo mdutil -E "/Volumes/MySecureDisk"

It works fine under Pather (loaded on an external FireWire drive). it works fine with non-secure disk images too.

[Trygve]

During a normal copy FW to FW, kernaltask takes about 3%. During a copy between encrypted disk images on the same FW drives, kernal task takes 97%... this according to top in terminal.