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Snow Leopard rot
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Columbus, OH
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Something is horribly wrong with my 2010 Mac Mini running SL Server.
After an as yet undetermined period of use (at least weeks), everything starts slowing down, I see the system busy cursor (SBOD to use the popular term) a lot. It gets to the point where the only fix is to reboot whereupon everything is just fine until some weeks have passed and the cycle starts over.
This seems so much like the old Windows paradigm and is very disheartening.
Why oh why is this happening?
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
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Memory leak causing heavy paging and hard drive thrashing?
Or, is it the classic but hopefully rare OS X issue where a process gets suspended at a low level in the kernel (accessing a hard drive I've always assumed), causing all hard drive access attempts to beach ball? I personally haven't seen that problem in a long time.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2000
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Originally Posted by Big Mac
Memory leak causing heavy paging and hard drive thrashing?
I haven't noticed anything unusual as far as the hard drive goes. Although the drives in this Mac are very quiet (as is the mini itself) and haven't noticed anything. I'll have to monitor the swap files to see if they grow over time.
How does one go about discovering an app that has a memory leak? Would I use Activity Monitor and look at Real Mem or Virtual Mem?
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Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Real memory in Activity Monitor.
Also, stick with 10.6.4
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
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How much RAM does this machine have?
The biggest guarantee of slowness is using virtual memory which happens when you run out of real memory. Often times a buggy application can cause this.
Virtual memory involves swapping disk space for memory, except SATA drives aren't equipped to handle all of this heavy disk thrashing, which results in the dreading SBOD.
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Join Date: May 2001
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If you want to see whether a lack of physical RAM is the problem, you need to watch the number of page-outs: if it exceeds a few 10s of MB after a day's worth of use and it's more in the GB range, it's an indication your system is running out of physical memory.
Then you can look for the culprit by sorting apps by memory usage.
Another reason could be a faulty harddrive where the computer is trying to access a damaged part of the harddrive and hangs, because it has to wait seconds to get the data it has been waiting for.
The latter fits with the description, because the drive then doesn't seek, but tries to read the same sector over and over again. Although notebook drives are rather silent and you don't necessarily hear them seeking.
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Last edited by OreoCookie; Dec 2, 2010 at 04:42 AM.
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
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Good point!
I'd recommend installing SmartReporter to see if your hard drive is triggering any SMART notifications about the pending failure of your drive.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Columbus, OH
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Originally Posted by besson3c
how much ram does this machine have?
The biggest guarantee of slowness is using virtual memory which happens when you run out of real memory. Often times a buggy application can cause this.
Virtual memory involves swapping disk space for memory, except sata drives aren't equipped to handle all of this heavy disk thrashing, which results in the dreading sbod.
4gb ram.
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Professional Poster
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Originally Posted by besson3c
Good point!
I'd recommend installing SmartReporter to see if your hard drive is triggering any SMART notifications about the pending failure of your drive.
Done. Disks are reported as ok.
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You've read the attributes, right?
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