[herbsman]

I noticed on my friend's mac pro 2.66 that the computer slows down considerably when copying a large file in the finder. he made a backup copy of his parallels virtual drive onto the desktop and then firefox started to crawl. same with safari, as well as most apps. he has 3 gigs of RAM so i was surprised but he says he noticed this on a lot intel macs.

is this normal?

[kansky]

I am sorry, but what kind of external drive you are using?

[herbsman]

Originally Posted by kansky 

I am sorry, but what kind of external drive you are using?

it's actually just copying from the same internal drive. a file size of roughly 6 gigs.

[Leonard]

I would expect it with any computer, PC or Mac, especially if you are talking Gigs of data. The CPU isn't slowing the computer down, the HD is. Your copying is reading and writing to the same HD so it's twice as busy and the heads are probably switching between locations, etc. So then your opening another app, and files from the same HD while this is going on, can you say HD contention.

[Tomchu]

This could be that controller driver issue that slowed the machine to a crawl or something when there was heavy disk access going on ...

[Xyrrus]

Originally Posted by herbsman 

I noticed on my friend's mac pro 2.66 that the computer slows down considerably when copying a large file in the finder. he made a backup copy of his parallels virtual drive onto the desktop and then firefox started to crawl. same with safari, as well as most apps. he has 3 gigs of RAM so i was surprised but he says he noticed this on a lot intel macs.

is this normal?

Is your friend's firmware up to date? I noticed similiar behavior on my Pro (iTunes, etc, would beach ball for 5 seconds during long installs, things like that) but I haven't had any issues recently. I have done 2 firmware updates since then, though. I regularly do large (200 gig) transfers between 2 internal raids and while I'm usually not present when they're going on, the times I have been around I haven't noticed this behavior anymore.

-Xy

[herbsman]

i'm pretty sure everything is up to date but i will have to double-check. after seeing his mac pro in action, i went home and performed a similar test on my dual 2.5. i copied 10 gigs worth of data from one folder to the desktop and ran apps in the background. while i did notice a slowdown, it was nothing compared to how his mac pro was during data copying. anyway thanks for all the input!

[darcybaston]

I've noticed this just by playing with Mac Pros at the Apple store. My DC 2GHZ G5 can copy gigs of data on the same volume without taking the performance dive one of the newer models do. It's almost like an operation like that is given too much priority over the UI on newer models.

[dankar]

Notice that too, with my 3 ghz (4 GB ram). When transferring files (80mb - 2 gb), a slow down is unavoidable. After that, when I try to access my 2nd Bay HD (750gb), it takes awhile to view the files. Never had any problem with my old G5 dual 2ghz with 250gb x 2 (internal).

Weird, right!

[rehoot]

I have a Mac Pro with 4GB ram and four hard drives (2 in RAID 0 and 2 in RAID 1). I played a song in iTunes, played a movie in Quick Time, ran BOINC (SetiAtHome) on 2 CPUs at 100% each, surfed the web including videos from YouTube, and copied 20GB on the RAID 0 with no beach balls. I then copied 4GB on the RAID 1 primary and had no beach balls. I also ran two YouTube videos at the same time. I got a couple pauses on the YouTube video, but I'm not sure if that was a streaming issue, and I see that when the computer is not stressed.

I saw no sign of "slowing" while copying. Perhaps the slow computers have applications that are hitting the disk or paging. Remember that you can have tons of RAM and some applications will still have real and virtual memory and will still page.