[Gavin]

Since I started up today moving my windows around is slow as molasses. It's especially noticeable with terminal windows which I have set to semi-transparent. Scrolling is OK but windows trail the mouse by up to a full second.

Reminds me of the beta.

A restart didn't help. CPU usage is normal. 3 GB free on the drive. Tried changing the screen resolution and refresh rate. I haven't installed any new software, etc.



10.3.7, boatload of ram

Any ideas?

[Thinine]

Better specs on your system would be nice.

[Devin Lane]

What's your system doing in the bg? What does top say?

[Gavin]

Here's the output from top. not much going on really. Nothing unusual in the system log.

the system is a b&w 350 G3, ~575 MB RAM
It runs just fine but today the window dragging has gone through the floor. Other things seem to be normal. it's really weird.

Code:
Processes:  46 total, 2 running, 44 sleeping... 113 threads            22:46:50
Load Avg:  0.83, 0.34, 0.23     CPU usage:  22.8% user, 12.6% sys, 64.6% idle
SharedLibs: num =  113, resident = 26.8M code, 3.03M data, 9.09M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num =  4770, resident = 59.9M + 9.75M private, 65.9M shared
PhysMem:  53.8M wired, 82.5M active,  119M inactive,  255M used,  320M free
VM: 2.45G + 79.8M   14068(0) pageins, 11(0) pageouts

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
  400 top         11.4%  0:01.37   1    16    26   276K   464K   652K  27.1M 
  399 tcsh         0.0%  0:00.08   1    13    20   376K   696K   892K  22.1M
  398 login        0.0%  0:00.06   1    13    37   140K   456K   508K  26.9M
  397 Terminal     4.2%  0:02.26   3    61   117  1.56M+ 8.71M  5.79M+ 93.1M 
  396 CocoaMySQL   0.0%  0:02.98   2    85   118  2.17M  10.4M  8.11M  94.5M
  390 AppleSpell   0.0%  0:00.15   1    29    62   536K  1.77M  1.64M  62.4M
  385 Safari       9.6%  1:44.43   5   109   324  26.4M  28.2M  46.5M   129M
  374 iTunesHelp   0.0%  0:00.13   1    50    59   332K  1.27M  1.25M  69.3M
  373 iCalAlarmS   0.0%  0:00.23   1    60    70   624K  1.70M  2.18M  78.0M
  370 Finder       0.0%  0:03.24   1    85   217  3.44M  19.6M  13.8M   108M
  369 SystemUISe   0.0%  0:01.49   1   180   161  1.62M  8.55M  5.29M  99.8M
  368 Dock         0.0%  0:01.38   2    75   121   560K  13.7M  2.64M  85.1M
  367 slpd         0.0%  0:00.05   6    29    37   232K  1.07M   904K  30.4M
  362 pbs          0.0%  0:00.97   2    32    41   764K  2.78M  1.87M  45.2M
  348 ucontrold    0.0%  0:00.13   1    33    63   588K  1.57M  1.60M  46.0M
  339 AppleFileS   0.0%  0:01.22   2    54    35   736K  1.95M  1.22M  31.8M
  315 automount    0.0%  0:00.05   2    29    27   232K   940K   936K  28.3M
  310 automount    0.0%  0:00.38   3    49    38   320K  1.05M  1.18M  29.1M
  306 rpc.lockd    0.0%  0:00.00   1     9    15    60K   424K   148K  17.7M
  294 nfsiod       0.0%  0:00.00   5    29    23   100K   368K   164K  19.6M
  286 cupsd        0.0%  0:00.38   1    11    28   316K   992K   828K  28.3M

[osxrules]

Top doesn't always show all your processes because for some reason someone made the terminal so you can't scroll in certain states like man pages, which I think you could in earlier versions of X (not top though).

Why isn't the windowserver in the list? I'm pretty sure that's what draws windows. Maybe you'd just restarted at that point or something.

Make sure you haven't used apps that do things like turn on window compression or install custom themes or turn off double buffering. Also, check that your graphics card is ok and see if swicthing to 16-bit colour makes a difference.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Try top -u

[Gavin]

thanks

WindowServ jumps to 84% when I shake the terminal window as opposed to 78% for other windows.

Dropping the resolution and depth way down only makes a marginal difference.

I'm not running any custom themes or anything like that.

You know I did try out a game a while ago. Could it have switched something off on the video card?

How would I check for that?

Is that the sort of thing that zapping the PRAM would reset?

[osxrules]

Originally posted by Gavin:

You know I did try out a game a while ago. Could it have switched something off on the video card?

It might have switched off quartz extreme so that the desktop wasn't using the graphics card and all the GPU was going to the game but I doubt a games programmer would do that unless it was a game that could be run in windowed mode. Even then I assume you have a graphics card that supports it (Radeon or Geforce).

Is that the sort of thing that zapping the PRAM would reset?

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/PRAM.html

I don't think so but I don't know if graphics card config is stored there. I would check using the quartz debug program that comes with the developer tools if quartz extreme has been turned off because if so, it would mean that all your windows are being drawn by your processor instead of your graphics card. On my 700g3 ibook with Radeon, I can shake windows as fast as I can move them and the windowserver registers about 30-40% cpu.

If quartz debug shows nothing unusual, try the PRAM.

PS use the activity monitor in utilities folder instead of top.