[Esquare]

Originally posted by ret:
I'm glad to see I'm not alone.

[...]

What is concerning me now is that in booting OS9 to run those tools it still took just as long to start-up, which suggests to me that it's either:
hardware problem, or
low-level disk driver problem
I'm not filled with joy by either of those alternatives....

I hate to tell you this, but it looks that you are alone after all, because this doesn't look like the other problems mentioned in this thread at all.

Be sure to make a full backup of your hard disk!

[spambot]

ret, what you describe sounds not at all like an OS-level problem, but rather like a hardware level read error, eg due to a bad block. an attempt to read a file which occupies an unreadable block on a disk will result in the disk making a whole lot of noise as it tries repeatedly to read that block. sounds similar to vm thrashing, but the circumstances you describe hearing it under are not ones it makes sense for vm thrashing to occur (you do have more than 32 MB of ram, so should be able to boot ). presumably there is some hardware flaw with a sector occupied by some file accessed during startup. if boot still completes after grinding for twenty minutes, either the disk is eventually able to read that file, or the file is simply not that essential.
unless it is a piece of the filesystem that occupies this bad block, rebuilding the filesystem will complete without problem. and if the file occupying the bad block isn't fragmented, defragging will similarly not show any problems, since it inherently only manifests when that certain file is accessed. the only way to find all such problems is to read your entire disk.
while a problem of this type will not "spread" to damage more data the way file system corruption can, the first block to die on adisk is rarely the last .
ps. obviously, if you isolate the file that causes the problem, don't delete it!

[Drizzt]

Code:
[20:30:04][drizzt@Guenhwyvar ~]%uptime
 8:30PM  up 21 days,  3:53, 1 user, load averages: 0.15, 0.10, 0.27
[20:30:06][drizzt@Guenhwyvar ~]%

[20:30:06][drizzt@Guenhwyvar ~]%ls /var/vm/
app_profile  swapfile0    swapfile1    swapfile2
[20:30:23][drizzt@Guenhwyvar ~]%

That should close the discussion

[ret]

Spambot,

Thank you for your succinct and insightful reply. I will run a bad-block scan and see what turns up, although I'd welcome any suggestions on what you would recommend if I find any. I can back-up my current installation easily enough, would you recommend that I zero out the drive and rebuild it?

For what it's worth, the hard drive was swapped from my machine to a loaner and back again while mine was getting serviced recently (faulty screen, unrelated problem). Although it seemed to boot up fine after the swap back and certainly wasn't exhibiting the slowness problems I'm seeing now, I have wondered whether that introduced the problem rather than the 10.2.6 upgrade. The fact that the problem didn't show itself immediately led me to think probably not. But now I'm not so sure....

Thanks again,
RET

[Jim Stoneburner]

System running fine (no beach balls on app launch, fast frontmost app changes, etc.) Pismo G3/500, 640MB, 10.2.6.

I had used Software Update (as opposed to downloading) to update Safari again (same version, different method).

I also ran DiskWarrior again.

Then I disabled the following:

Third party Application Enhancers:
FruitMenu.ape
ICeCoffEE.ape

Third party CMMs:
CopyPath.plugin
FruitMenu CMM.plugin
OpenSubfolder.plugin
XRay Contextual Menu
AddBookmark.plugin
GrimRipperCM.plugin

PreferencePanes:
APE Manager.prefPane (a suspect?)
ComApcPowerChutePref.prefPane (major suspect... earlier versions buggy)
FruitMenu.prefPane
TinkerTool.prefPane

Components:
SharedMenus.component
TypeIt4Me.component

Left enabled:
PTHPasteboard
PTHClock

Data from Terminal:

Lots of pageouts, lots of translation faults. Mean anything? Maybe not, as the system is running fine.

Code:
[Jim-Stoneburner:~] jds% uptime

11:41AM  up 3 days, 10:21, 1 user, load averages: 0.53, 0.69, 0.55

[Jim-Stoneburner:~] jds% top -uw

  411 Transport    0.8%  1:25.66   3    84          135  3.34M   544K         4
Processes:  60 total, 2 running, 58 sleeping... 180 threads
Load Avg:  0.82, 0.79, 0.67     CPU usage:  17.8% user, 22.9% sys, 59.3% idl
SharedLibs: num =    7, resident = 2.09M code, 292K data, 508K LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 10455, resident =  245M + 8.54M private,  143M shared
PhysMem:  70.3M wired,  374M active,  185M inactive,  629M used, 11.3M free
VM: 3.09G + 3.62M   26440(0) pageins, 35681(0) pageouts

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS(delta) #MREGS VPRVT  RPRVT(delta)  R
 5842 top         14.4%  0:01.08   1    14           18  1.29M   288K
  164 ATSServer   11.0% 31:04.94   2    66          364  3.20M  1.11M         9
 2758 Overseer     7.6% 45:51.68  12    74          172  5.72M  2.09M(  -8K)  8
  178 Window Man   5.9%  2:33:10   3   923         1732  25.3M  19.1M( 148K)  7
  420 URL Manage   2.5% 71:52.55   2    77          693  56.7M  43.3M         2
    0 kernel_tas   1.6% 54:29.79  35     0            -      -      -
 2639 mozilla-bi   1.6% 13:41.91  13   196          815   186M  34.3M         3
  109 configd      1.6%  8:56.31   3   120          163  1.64M   492K
 4999 Terminal     1.6%  0:15.57   4    67(    1)   188  5.46M  2.96M         7
 2642 Tex-Edit P   0.8%  4:06.10   2    78          381  7.27M  5.02M         2
 2763 perl         0.8%  1:02.92   1     9           14   960K   148K       
  344 cupsd        0.8%  0:55.93   1     8           50  5.79M  1008K         1
 1070 Safari       0.0% 67:20.18  11  1125         2111   340M  73.9M         4
  401 Finder       0.0% 19:10.63   3   149          437  29.7M  21.8M         3
  400 SystemUISe   0.0%  3:16.61   5  3155          249  7.98M  4.05M         1

[Jim-Stoneburner:~] jds% vm_stat
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free:                     2319.
Pages active:                  95890.
Pages inactive:                47669.
Pages wired down:              17962.
"Translation faults":       99772769.
Pages copy-on-write:          509149.
Pages zero filled:          94069508.
Pages reactivated:            646946.
Pageins:                       26324.
Pageouts:                      33374.
Object cache: 309574 hits of 411082 lookups (75% hit rate)
[Jim-Stoneburner:~] jds% ps -auxcm
USER   PID %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS  TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
jds   1070   0.0 13.0   453988  84988  ??  S    Sun10PM  67:20.18 Safari
jds    178   3.6 12.5   688740  82124  ??  Ss   Sun01AM 152:14.93 Window Manager
jds   2639   0.3  9.0   372336  58944  ??  S     3:33PM  13:34.77 mozilla-bin
jds    420   2.2  6.8   139492  44724  ??  S    Sun01AM  71:39.62 LaunchCFMApp
jds    401   0.0  5.0   186928  32512  ??  S    Sun01AM  18:52.70 Finder
jds   2641   0.0  3.6   127652  23812  ??  S     3:45PM   2:46.44 LaunchCFMApp
root   313   0.0  2.6    76556  16976  ??  Ss   Sun01AM   0:16.84 coreservicesd
jds   2643   0.0  2.3    79664  14848  ??  S     4:15PM   1:24.96 Preview
jds   2642   3.0  2.1    94036  13700  ??  S     3:55PM   3:32.32 Tex-Edit Plus
jds   2580   0.0  1.7    89060  11440  ??  S     3:24PM   1:55.72 LaunchCFMApp
jds   2758   0.3  1.1    52344   7536  ??  S     2:49AM  44:40.31 Overseer
jds    400   0.0  1.0    75984   6256  ??  S    Sun01AM   3:16.59 SystemUIServer
jds   4999   3.1  0.9    50044   5976  ??  S    11:41AM   0:01.70 Terminal
jds    164   0.0  0.7    46656   4388  ??  Ss   Sun01AM  30:19.22 ATSServer
jds    357   0.0  0.6    56084   4020  ??  Ss   Sun01AM   0:33.02 loginwindow
jds    398   0.0  0.5    51796   3456  ??  S    Sun01AM   1:05.53 Dock
jds   1058   0.0  0.5    47776   3016  ??  S    Sun10PM   0:04.86 SecurityAgent
jds    412   0.0  0.5    48244   2988  ??  S    Sun01AM   1:40.47 PTHPasteboard
jds    414   0.0  0.3    49992   1780  ??  S    Sun01AM   0:38.51 PTHClock
jds    411   0.0  0.3    41772   1680  ??  S    Sun01AM   1:25.27 LaunchCFMApp
root   380   0.0  0.2    21868   1612  ??  S    Sun01AM   0:05.80 DirectoryService
root   344   0.0  0.2    20044   1488  ??  Ss   Sun01AM   0:55.73 cupsd
jds    415   0.0  0.2    45660   1248  ??  S    Sun01AM   0:01.32 USB Monitor
jds    413   0.0  0.2    45648   1220  ??  S    Sun01AM   0:00.70 escapepod
jds    403   0.0  0.2    44044   1192  ??  S    Sun01AM   0:03.73 TWAINBridge

.... and so on.

[Jim Stoneburner]

Soon, I'll try re-enabling items until I find the source of the problem. My guesses for the most likely culprit:

APE Manager.prefPane (a suspect?)
ComApcPowerChutePref.prefPane (major suspect... earlier versions buggy)
SharedMenus.component
TypeIt4Me.component


If the problem was due to Safari, I may never be able to reproduce it (now that I've reinstalled it via Software Update instead of downloading it).

[talisker]

Probably not strictly relevant to this specific issue, but I was having all sorts of performance problems on my ibook 600 with 10.2.6, lots of disk churning, spinning beach ball thingy, it was almost getting unusable. Just out of interest I stopped using Safari, and everything has been transformed ever since. All the problems are gone. A shame, since I like Safari, but IE it is for me for the time being.

[ret]

OK,

I ran the bad block scan. 10 hours later, no errors reported. I don't believe my problem is related to Safari, since it manifests itself right from start-up.

Interesting development, tho. The DiskWarrior fixes corrected whatever the problem was with booting OS9, which now completes as fast as it ever did. OS9 is not a solution, though.

Also, used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my 10.2.6 install onto external HD. Attempting to boot off that exhibits exactly the same problems, which leads to the simple conclusion that it's software and not a hardware problem.

Am getting a copy of 10.2.6 combo update, and will try installing that before *sigh* biting the bullet and reinstalling from scratch.

Thanks to those who've helped so far, apologies to those bored by my travails...

cheers
RET

[suthercd]

ret-

Have you created a new user, then logged in under that account? See what your performance is at that point.

Craig

[ret]

suthercd,

I'm aware of that debug method, but I haven't tried it, only because the problem occurs right from nearly the beginning of the boot sequence. If I start with cmd-V held down, it can take many minutes to get past the Unix rc output up to the blue-screen, and also from that point to the appearance of the desktop, and from that point to being ready-to-go. The auto-login occurs somewhere during the blue-screen phase.

But I'll give it a try and see whether it has any effect at any point.

Thanks for the tip.

cheers
RET

[trusted_content]

OK I was having this problem, same as the rest of you, so I decided to disable all of my haxies. Problem solved (but oh, how I miss FruitMenu)

[Esquare]

Originally posted by trusted_content:
OK I was having this problem, same as the rest of you, so I decided to disable all of my haxies. Problem solved (but oh, how I miss FruitMenu)

I'm running FruitMenu without any problems. In the past, though, a corrupted FruitMenu preference file could cause this slowdown. It might be worth while to trash them and give it another try.

EE

[Nebrie]

Originally posted by ret:
JoeyA and Jim,

I'm glad to see I'm not alone. I'm having the same problem with the constantly grinding disk drive, but it manifests itself well before the desktop actually appears. Rebooting the machine can take 20 minutes or more - as mentioned earlier when booting with apple-v down I see a lot of "waiting for local disks" and "waiting for application services" messages.

I have run DW, TechTool and defragged the HD (when I ran out of other ideas), none of which has made the slightest difference.

What is concerning me now is that in booting OS9 to run those tools it still took just as long to start-up, which suggests to me that it's either:
hardware problem, or
low-level disk driver problem
I'm not filled with joy by either of those alternatives....

RET

TiPB 500, 512MB Ram, 20GB Int HD

I just had a similar problem. DW3 didn't work. The Apple Genius told me to zero out my drive. Now it works great again, except that DW3 still reports that my SMART monitoring is indicating a pending drive failure.

[ret]

I've now run the 10.2.6 Combo Updater, followed by a Repair Permissions, followed by a full update_prebinding (sudo update_prebinding -verbose -force -root /)

Still running like a two-legged dog.



Guess there's nothing left now but a complete re-install. Might as well include a drive-zero-out in that

RET

[suthercd]

ret-

How is the responsiveness when you log in as a newly created user?

Craig

[ret]

Originally posted by suthercd:
ret-

How is the responsiveness when you log in as a newly created user?

Craig

I created a new user - no appreciable difference in start-up time or usability once the desktop appears.

Thanks for the suggestion tho.

cheers
RET

[Esquare]

Originally posted by Jim Stoneburner:
Soon, I'll try re-enabling items until I find the source of the problem. My guesses for the most likely culprit:

APE Manager.prefPane (a suspect?)
ComApcPowerChutePref.prefPane (major suspect... earlier versions buggy)
SharedMenus.component
TypeIt4Me.component


If the problem was due to Safari, I may never be able to reproduce it (now that I've reinstalled it via Software Update instead of downloading it).

Jim, just curious: any news on this?

EE

[kennedy]

What's the latest on this?

I recently upgraded my network to 10.2.6 and am now experiencing tremendously slow performance on my server... with nothing but the OS running on it. The feel is much like:
a) horrible paging on Unix boxes
b) serious disk fragmentation problems on Windows

For example, dragging a file to the trash... I get a spinning-disk (aka beach ball) for about 20 seconds when I first grab and drag the file... then as I drag it out of the window I get another spinning-disk for about 20s... then when I let go of the file over the trash another spinning-disk for about 20s. Double-click trash to see what's in there... 20-30s of spinning disk before it comes up.

I've been trying to install Office v.X update 10.1.2 since upgrading to OS 10.2.6... it is sluggish up to the point where it is searching my "Users" disk and seems to get stuck... though maybe its just ridiculously slow (as in hours).

Starting IE takes way longer than it used to and its performance way more sluggish than before.

Sooooo... has anything been determined on the sluggishness or memory leakiness of 10.2.6???

[KidRed]

Here's mine, doesn't look good-

total 2812608
drwx--x--x 8 root wheel 272 Jun 24 23:33 app_profile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 6 19:49 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 09:26 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 16:00 swapfile10
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 16:00 swapfile11
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 16:00 swapfile12
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 16:49 swapfile13
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 20:44 swapfile14
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 21:31 swapfile15
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 21:34 swapfile16
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 21:37 swapfile17
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 10:00 swapfile2
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 10:13 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 12:12 swapfile4
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 14:35 swapfile5
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 14:36 swapfile6
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 14:59 swapfile7
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 15:59 swapfile8
-rw------T 1 root wheel 80000000 Jul 7 16:00 swapfile9

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 34107.
Pages active: 128632.
Pages inactive: 76812.
Pages wired down: 22593.
"Translation faults": 40381676.
Pages copy-on-write: 113103.
Pages zero filled: 19198807.
Pages reactivated: 1674885.
Pageins: 138987.
Pageouts: 492152.

Processes: 61 total, 2 running, 59 sleeping... 243 threads 17:18:42
Load Avg: 0.45, 0.29, 0.33 CPU usage: 9.1% user, 10.8% sys, 80.1% idle
SharedLibs: num = 7, resident = 1.75M code, 148K data, 532K LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 18440, resident = 586M + 8.24M private, 118M shared
PhysMem: 88.8M wired, 502M active, 300M inactive, 891M used, 133M free
VM: 5.00G + 3.62M 138985(0) pageins, 492152(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1193 top 11.2% 0:41.99 1 14 18 300K 368K 596K 13.6M
1188 Safari 1.7% 0:18.34 9 183 357 13.7M 19.7M 39.0M 145M
1183 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.04 1 10 15 344K 632K 788K 5.73M
1182 login 0.0% 0:00.36 1 12 33 244K 420K 564K 13.7M
1179 Terminal 0.8% 0:09.97 7 152 273 3.30M 10.9M 22.8M 127M
1176 Transmit 0.0% 0:21.68 7 165 310 7.46M 14.1M 29.3M 135M
1135 imserviced 0.0% 0:38.17 1 21 33 408K 1.34M 1.48M 17.4M
1134 slpd 0.0% 0:03.34 8 35 31 104K 468K 460K 17.8M
1117 lookupd 0.0% 0:05.57 2 32 45 460K 516K 764K 14.9M
749 Adobe Phot 11.2% 1:50:11 11 179 8139 421M 37.6M 223M 788M
744 Adobe Imag 0.0% 11:51.92 8 158 670 19.5M 32.3M 30.2M 229M
729 imservices 0.8% 0:39.06 6 148 297 1.11M 7.89M 7.71M 126M
685 iChatAgent 0.0% 0:03.35 5 69 49 564K 1.85M 1.78M 82.2M
635 Dreamweave 0.8% 26:41.63 9 160 836 35.1M 24.7M 39.4M 230M
625 iChat 0.0% 2:28.12 9 197 369 5.11M 15.4M 22.9M 149M
623 Proteus 0.0% 4:07.43 6 185 385 4.74M 12.5M 16.7M 145M
585 readconfig 0.0% 0:00.11 2 18 19 4K 324K 252K 13.6M
584 writeconfi 0.0% 0:00.10 1 16 21 4K 692K 416K 14.0M
574 System Pre 0.0% 0:30.11 9 191 306 2.32M 10.3M 14.8M 136M

I'm running Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Safari, Mail, iChat, Transmit, Proteus Suitcase, ImageReady, iTunes and Terminal. I have 1gig of RAM.

19 VM swaps? That can't be good. Quitting Safari dropped one swap file, so I doubt it's Safari's prob, course, I don't understand any of this unix stuff

[PrettyBoyClone]

Having pretty much the same problem, I'll share what I've learned so far.

It all started going downhill for me with some disk corruption that went haywire. I ended up rebuilding and reformatting as a madman, and managed to save a lot of my stuff.

I deleted all files with corruptions exept for one; my entourage database, which is f**ked, (but also 70.000 mails big, so i refuse to kill it).

Anyway my system stalls for a couple of minutes on a daily basis, but ONLY entourage is running.

I turned off the db deamon, which didn't change a thing, so by now i have pretty much concluded at the problem has to do with the system touching large files with corruptions such as EOF in them.

Everything stalls and waits for a timeout of some sort.

btw, I tried rebuilding the db, and i tried exporting my mails, but haven't been successful yet

[kennedy]

Originally posted by PrettyBoyClone:
so by now i have pretty much concluded at the problem has to do with the system touching large files with corruptions such as EOF in them.

Everything stalls and waits for a timeout of some sort.

Very interesting conclusion... My "Users" disk has been a bit flaky. Disk First Aid shows need for repairs, tries to repair it, thinks it repairs it, but running it again shows exactly the same problems. Sometimes when I login it pops up telling me I inserted a disk that is not recognizable... but the disk is mounted and usable nonetheless. A couple times it was NOT mounted and I ended up having to boot into OS9 to get it to mount and then restart in OS X. Weird.

Yes, I tried DiskWarrior... but no real success with it... if it weren't for all the positive comments on this forum, I'd think DW was not yet useful with OS X. I might experiment some more with it.

But if those problems are causing long time-outs, then that might explain the problem and clarifies a potential solution. I'm going in early to try the install without Users mounted... and see if that solves the problems.

Thanks.

[kennedy]

Indeed... the installer runs just fine with Users unmounted.

Sooo, I currently assume all my speed problems are related to the disk errors on my Users disk. Evidently, the OS re-reads faulty stuff repeatedly... I suppose hoping it gets a better answer.

DiskWarrior can't even boot up on my problem machine... maybe my DW disk is bad.

Thanks.

[PrettyBoyClone]

Originally posted by kennedy:
Indeed... the installer runs just fine with Users unmounted.

Sooo, I currently assume all my speed problems are related to the disk errors on my Users disk. Evidently, the OS re-reads faulty stuff repeatedly... I suppose hoping it gets a better answer.

DiskWarrior can't even boot up on my problem machine... maybe my DW disk is bad.

Thanks.

Maybe your problem is a different one. I've seen several installers stop (including office update) because they've tried to search for files over smb mounts.

So my advice in general is to unmount all things smb before installing anything.

[kennedy]

No SMB mounts here... no Windoze printing... no Windoze anything.
And if Apple will cooperate at all, I intend to keep it that way.

[kelesh]

Hrm, memory usage getter says i'm using 847mb out of 1gb. Running 2 Terminals, adium, and safari with 3 tabs. 25000 pageins and 11000 pageouts in 17 days uptime, but the vast majority of that time theh tibook has been in sleep mode. Not sluggish or anything, but 847mb seems like a high usage number considering i'm not really doing anything.

[amigasoc]

If it's of any help to anyone, a colleage of mine (800MHz G4 LCD iMac, 256 megs RAM) has been experiencing similar problems. She's got virtually nothing on the machine, except Norton Antivirus (which it would appear has also been suspected of slowing machines down). I really didn't want to go down the road of reinstalling the box, so I tried fixing the permissions and optimising the disc. That didn't help.

I then removed all the settings. Actually, I more or less trashed the user account and rebuilt the configuration by hand. No luck there either. The console didn't show anything useful at the time the machine started to slow down.

In desperation, the only thing left was to tar up the contents of the disc and reinstall from scratch. After reinstallation, I reimported the mail, set it up again, put back Norton, Office X, and the latest version of Stuffit as well as letting Software Update do it's thing.

Given the fact that the machine was always running OK until 10.2.6, I'm running out of other conclusions (although I must admit that I personally have only been using MacOS X for several months, so I'm by no means an expert in that field, but I do know a reasonable amount about UNIX, and this has the hallmarks of a memory leak). Norton, Office and Stuffit have all been on there for ages. Safari is the only other semi recent addition, and while this too has been blamed by others in the past for memory leakage, she's experienced the same problems under IE.

In short, I'd have to throw my support behind the "10.2.6 has a memory leak" crowd because I believe I've exhausted every other option! However, given that another colleague is running 10.2.6 on a different spec machine, I'm guessing this problem is peculiar to specific models. Roll on 10.2.7...

[KidRed]

A few days after posting my info above i decided to run first aid, it would not finish verifying due to an error. It reported some bad blocks. I then bought DW 3 and I ran from another HD and it would not complete either. I had no choice but to back up, wipe and reinstall.

[suthercd]

After the reinstall, how is your performance?

Craig

[KidRed]

Much better. Run Disk First Aide and see if you get any errors. I did, which may have compounded my situation. I didn't want to copy and re-install, because it's a tedious and lengthly process. I can run top ,again for a comparison if you want.