[callefoss]

I don't know if anybody can help me because I suppose the problem I have can be due to many things. Lately after upgrading to Tiger I experience the spinning wheel many times in iTunes (right after double clicking a song) and sometimes in the finder. In finder it is happening more and more frequently. It also happens in word and other applications just before opening a file or saving it. At the beginning I hought it had to do with spotlight but I doubt it since I am not adding or moving a file, and my computer is relatively fast. I also have two physical hard drives of 160Gb each. I have obviously repaired permissions. Let me know if anybody has an idea of how to find out what the problem might be. Thanks in advance.

[Deal]

The major reason Tiger is slow is because of Spotlight. It is constantly indexing files and content. There are hacks on line to disable spotlight and you'll see regained speed.

There are utilities out there that help change some spotlight settings. I was told this app does:

http://www.northernsoftworks.com/tigercachecleaner.html

...however, I haven't tried it myself yet.

Would be eager to hear of other's experience in this matter too.

Deal

[Randman]

Originally Posted by Deal

The major reason Tiger is slow is because of Spotlight. It is constantly indexing files and content.

No, it indexes once then updates information as needed.

If you repaired permissions, what about other maintenance? Run cron jobs, etc?

[Nexus5]

Originally Posted by Deal

The major reason Tiger is slow is because of Spotlight. It is constantly indexing files and content.

This is pure BS.

Nexus5

[turtle777]

Fresh install fo Tiger or Archive and Install ?
Do you have a second partition where to do a fresh Tiger install ?

If so, make a fresh install and use the migration assistant to move your existing data and see what happens.

-t

[callefoss]

Thanks for your replies.

I do not have any partitions but if I would do a clean install I could just back up my data and reinstall the OS. However, I would like to avoid all the time this takes and try other alternatives first.

Randman: I am not running any cron jobs. Do you mean these cron jobs would take up capacity or did you mean as running maintenance tasks?

What about other maintenance options?

Thanks.

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by Deal

The major reason Tiger is slow is because of Spotlight. It is constantly indexing files and content. There are hacks on line to disable spotlight and you'll see regained speed.

There are utilities out there that help change some spotlight settings. I was told this app does:

http://www.northernsoftworks.com/tigercachecleaner.html

...however, I haven't tried it myself yet.

Would be eager to hear of other's experience in this matter too.

Deal

This is ridiculous. Tiger is not "constantly indexing files," when you write a changed file with updated metadata, the kernel is notified and it stores the updated info in the database. This takes very little time/effort on the part of the machine. My machine has been up for 7 days without a reboot, and mds (which is the metadata indexing service) has taken 4 minutes and 27 seconds of CPU time.

If you want to disable spotlight, out of curiosity, you don't need to resort to some stupid GUI hack, either. Just edit /etc/hostconfig, and change the line to:

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

And reboot. There, you're done. You can re-enable it, though when doing that you may have the database out of synch with the file system, and you'd need to re-index everything (which is pretty easy to do).

[himself]

It ain't spotlight, unless spotlight is still indexing your volumes. It is more likely to be the dock/dashboard, which I found renders my machine nearly useless for random moments at a time, and when it is not activated.

However, I recently conducted a thorough cleaning of the cache files (using the deep cleaning option in Tiger Cache Cleaner, with local and system cache options checked -- I could've done it manually but I'm lazy) and now Tiger has been performing like a champ. I don't know what effect the cache cleaning had on the dock/dashboard, if any, but it hasn't been giving me any problems since.

[Deal]

Think what you like, but spotlight does chew up processor time. I can't believe there are people that so rudely attack something they are clueless about (well, I guess I do, there are a lot of rude people here).

It was a developer request before Tiger was even out that spotlight have an option to disable it. It was requested by multiple people.

There are several posts in my own user group regarding the hacks to shut it off, (which I may not necessarily approve of) but it from the users of these it is agreed that they have gotten their 10.3 speed back. It is said to be much more dramatic for laptops than dual G5s.

It has to index everything that changes. It indexes when you get mail and mail takes a huge hit from it.

Before you go knocking me again, why don't you go check out some of the links that talk about disabling it and see what they say. Why don't you go check the link above and ask the creator why they put in an option to disable it?

I'm sure you will be as fast to apologize as you are do condemn.

Deal

[tkmd]

Whats your uptime (open terminal type 'uptime'). ZTiger seems to slow for me after about a month - usually after mounting a server or two. A restart puts everything back to normal speed. I hope that this gets fixed in 10.4.2

[Deal]

I shut my system down often ( I take it out to image with my telescope ).

tkmd, I wonder if your issue has to do with the Samba issue. Are you connecting using AFP or SMB? If your connections are AFP, nevermind...

Since I updated our servers to Tiger they have been slower over the network on SMB connections and after a not yet known amount of time SMB up and quits talking. I have to restart windows services and all is well again—for a while.

If this Samba bug can cause SMB clients to have these problems connecting to the server I don't see why the OS X clients can't have the same problem connecting to a server.

Just a thought.

Deal

PS: Samba has already been updated but Apple hasn't implemented the fix in an OS X update yet.

[Deal]

Originally Posted by Nexus5

This is pure BS.

Nexus5

Glad you know so much. Here, look at these:

Here are a few links to look at:

http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/spotlight.html

quote: Endless Indexing

Spotlight's indexes are maintained by the Tiger behind the scenes. Unfortunately, some users have discovered the 'mdimport' process sucking up nearly all their computer resources, apparently reading files from disk for indexing, but running for days and not finishing. Unlike initial indexing when Tiger is first installed, the Spotlight menu is available for use in this scenario, but does not return complete results. Apple Mail and Finder searches also may fail to return full results.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50504012104186

quote: I say this not because I like Spotlight that much (good idea, still too funky and I miss the simplicity of the old Finder filename search), but because one of my partitions was incessantly indexing every time I downloaded something with Thoth (apparently it interpreted the temp files as text that needed indexing, leading to a ridiculous amount of scanning), even when I told it to ignore that folder, so I eventually just added the whole drive. At which point, I suddenly had 500MB more free space, leading me to believe that indeed, the index is deleted.

http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/slow_spotlights_indexing

Just read the whole thing...

[Randman]

Originally Posted by callefoss

I am not running any cron jobs. ... did you mean as running maintenance tasks?

What about other maintenance options?

Yes. Onyx and Cocktail are two good ones.

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by Deal

Glad you know so much. Here, look at these:

Here are a few links to look at:

http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/spotlight.html

quote: Endless Indexing

Spotlight's indexes are maintained by the Tiger behind the scenes. Unfortunately, some users have discovered the 'mdimport' process sucking up nearly all their computer resources, apparently reading files from disk for indexing, but running for days and not finishing. Unlike initial indexing when Tiger is first installed, the Spotlight menu is available for use in this scenario, but does not return complete results. Apple Mail and Finder searches also may fail to return full results.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50504012104186

quote: I say this not because I like Spotlight that much (good idea, still too funky and I miss the simplicity of the old Finder filename search), but because one of my partitions was incessantly indexing every time I downloaded something with Thoth (apparently it interpreted the temp files as text that needed indexing, leading to a ridiculous amount of scanning), even when I told it to ignore that folder, so I eventually just added the whole drive. At which point, I suddenly had 500MB more free space, leading me to believe that indeed, the index is deleted.

http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/slow_spotlights_indexing

Just read the whole thing...

Deal, these don't describe "normal" spotlight use. They describe a couple specific instances where people have encountered a bug or a runaway process. It's rare. And these instances are easily detectable by running 'top' or activity monitor... if you see something that has chewed 14 hours of CPU time, it's worth investigating.

My point is, and I'll reiterate it, that normally Spotlight takes very little CPU time. It doesn't bring everything to a crawl. In a week's worth of uptime, mds took a little over 4 minutes of CPU. 'mdimport' will index newly created documents, but it's almost undetectable.

If the importing is hogging huge chunks of time, it's better to find out what's causing the problem, rather than just eliminate the symptom, which is to turn off Spotlight.

[sspire]

Originally Posted by callefoss

Thanks for your replies.

I do not have any partitions but if I would do a clean install I could just back up my data and reinstall the OS. However, I would like to avoid all the time this takes and try other alternatives first.

What about other maintenance options?

Thanks.

In the time it will take you to do the research and explore other alternatives, you could have backed up your data, reformatted, partitioned, performed a clean install of Tiger and moved everything you need back on. And it will save you a lot of time in the long run expecially if you're losing minutes which add up quickly out of every hour of every day you stay with your system as it is now.

I am 98% sure the speed issue is a result of not performing a clean install of Tiger. There are numerous reports at the macfixit.com forums of people having the same problem and case after case each were solved by performing a clean install. It's a good opportunity to start "fresh" and to partition your drive (which is always a good idea so you can have a backup system to boot up off of to use DiskUtility to Repair Disk and to run DiskWarrior on your main system volume for regular maintenance. I've never understood why more people don't partition their drives - especially if you don't have an external drive to boot from and if you've got the room to do so. Another partition also allows you to do a clean install of a new system and play with it before converting completely without affecting your existing system.

For those who have the room, I always recommend that drives be partitioned into at least three volumes if there is ample room to do so. All formated in HFS+ Journaled. It is preferred and recommended to journal your volumes. The exception to this is for audio and video data which are best on non-journaled volumes. The OS is best on a journaled volume. So anyone working with audio and video production should have dedicated volumes for audio and video files.

More info:

Mac OS X: About file system journaling

"Journaling" is a feature that helps protect the file system against power outages or hardware component failures, reducing the need for repairs. Journaling was first introduced in Mac OS X Server 10.2.2, then to the non-server OS in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. This document explains some of the benefits of using this feature and how it works.

Journaling for the Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) file system enhances computer availability and fault resilience, which is especially noteworthy for servers. Journaling protects the integrity of the file system on Xserve and other computers using Mac OS X Server in the event of an unplanned shutdown or power failure. It also helps to maximize the uptime of servers and connected storage devices by expediting repairs to the affected volumes when the system restarts.

Journaling is a technique that helps protect the integrity of the Mac OS Extended file systems on Mac OS X volumes. It both prevents a disk from getting into an inconsistent state and expedites disk repair if the server fails.

When you enable journaling on a disk, a continuous record of changes to files on the disk is maintained in the journal. If your computer stops because of a power failure or some other issue, the journal is used to restore the disk to a known-good state when the server restarts.

With journaling turned on, the file system logs transactions as they occur. If the server fails in the middle of an operation, the file system can "replay" the information in its log and complete the operation when the server restarts.

Although you may experience loss of user data that was buffered at the time of the failure, the file system is returned to a consistent state. In addition, restarting the computer is much faster. Always remember to back up your data as frequently as necessary.

Why is journaling needed?
A power outage or system failure interrupts read and write processes, which can cause discrepancies between the file system directory and the actual location and structure of stored files. In an unjournaled file system, drives are in an unknown state after a failure, meaning that there is no record of their activity just prior to the shutdown. Before the server can restart and resume services, it must perform a consistency check that requires going through the entire file system, block by block. This process can take hours on a multi-terabyte volume, resulting in an unacceptable period of server downtime.

Journaling accelerates the recovery time after an unexpected shutdown, significantly improving the availability of server and storage systems. When journaling is turned on on a storage volume, the server automatically tracks file system operations and maintains a continuous record of these transactions in a separate file, called a journal. The operating system can use the journal to return the file system to a known, consistent state after a failure. This eliminates the need to perform a consistency check on the entire file system during startup. Instead, when the server is restarted, Mac OS X simply replays recent transactions in the journal, bringing the system up-to-date and resuming operations that were interrupted during the failure. With a journaled file system, server restart takes just a few seconds, regardless of the number of files, or the size of the volume.

Backward Compatible
Journaled file system is part of a set of incremental enhancements to the Mac OS Extended file system, and it is backward compatible with the Mac OS Extended file system. Users can read, write, and access journaled Mac OS Extended volumes on computers that do not have a journaling feature.

Most disk utilities designed to work with the Mac OS Extended file system can also be used when journaling is turned on. You should check with your disk utility vendor before using earlier disk utilities with a journaled file system.

When Should Journaling Be Used?
Journaling is best suited for servers requiring high availability, servers containing volumes with many files, and servers containing data that is backed up at infrequent intervals (nightly, for example).

If a volume contains read-only data that is not mission-critical, it may not be necessary to turn on journaling if performance is more important than safety.

If your server contains high-bandwidth usage data files, such as large video, graphics, or audio files, you may want to weigh the benefits of using journaling against the performance needed to access your data. In most cases, the impact of journaling upon data access performance are unnoticeable to users, but its implementation may not be practical for servers where data access demands outweigh its benefits.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107249

[HFS+]
HFS+ is the preferred filesystem on Mac OS X. It supports journaling, quotas, byte-range locking Finder information in metadata, multiple encodings, hard and symbolic links, aliases, support for hidin file extensions on a per-file basis, etc. HFS+ uses B-Trees heavily for many of its internals

[Similar to HFS]
HFS+ is architecturally similar to HFS, with several important improvements such as:

- 32 bits used for allocation blocks (instead of 16). HFS divides the disk space on a partition into equal-sized allocation-blocks. Since 16 bits are used to refer to an allocation-block, there can be at most 216 allocation blocks on an HFS filesystem. Thus, using 32 bits for identifying allocation blocks results in much less wasted space (and more files).
- Long file names up to 255 characters
- Unicode based file name encoding
- File/Directory attributes can be extended in future (as opposed to being fixed size)
- In addition to a System Folder ID (for starting Apple operating systems), a dedicated startup file that can easily be found (its location and size are stored in the volume header in a fixed location) during startup, is also supported so that non-Apple systems can boot from a HFS+ filesystem
- Largest file size is 263 bytes

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_fs.html

I'm a post-production consultant to a variety of broadcast and film production studios throughout Hollywood. In dealing with my clients, their number one concern is maximizing the performance of their equipment, while maintaining the highest level of data integrity.

New to most of us with OS X 10.3 is File Journaling. First released by Apple in OS X Server 10.2, this new feature has a direct impact on how we get maximum performance with maximum safety for our editing systems.

According to Apple's web site: "Journaling is a technique that helps protect the integrity of the Mac OS Extended file systems on Mac OS X volumes. It both prevents a disk from getting into an inconsistent state and expedites disk repair if the server fails.

"When you enable journaling on a disk, a continuous record of changes to files on the disk is maintained in the journal. If your computer stops because of a power failure or some other issue, the journal is used to restore the disk to a known-good state when the server restarts.

"With journaling turned on, the file system logs transactions as they occur. If the server fails in the middle of an operation, the file system can 'replay' the information in its log and complete the operation when the server restarts."

Basically, Unix, in order to get improved performance, keeps disk directories in memory and only periodically writes them to your hard disk. If you crash, your directories are, in almost all cases, out of sync with the files recorded on your hard drives.

Many of us, faced with a system crash, will use FSCK (or, if the situation is really bad, Disk Warrior X) to rebuild our directories. However, with OS X 10.3, FSCK no longer works the way it did in 10.2. In fact, it doesn't work at all. This is because file journaling is turned on by default in OS X 10.3.

When journaling is turned on, every time you write a file to your hard disk, or modify an existing file, the operating system writes an entry into a transaction file. This is MUCH quicker than writing out the full directory structure.

Journaling is also much safer for your data because if you crash, the operating system uses the journal to update the directory structure, which means far less lost data and far faster reboots.

The problem is that journaling takes time. Enough time that it is worth considering turning journaling off on all your media drives. The benefit is that you get faster performance. The disadvantage is that in the event of a crash, you don't have the protection journaling provides. On the third hand, hard drives with journaling turned off are in no worse shape than hard drives running under OS 10.2.

In my experience with a wide variety of media clients, disk directory problems almost never arise with secondary drives, they are almost exclusively the domain of the boot disk.

As Apple writes: "If your [computer] contains high-bandwidth usage data files, such as large video, graphics, or audio files, you may want to weigh the benefits of using journaling against the performance needed to access your data. In most cases, the impact of journaling upon data access performance are unnoticeable to users, but its implementation may not be practical for [computers] where data access demands outweigh its benefits.

My recommendation? Leave journaling turned on for your boot disk and turn it off for all secondary drives (both internal and external) that are used to store media files. For external drives that store data, not media, turn journaling on.

Journaling is controlled using Disk Utility. And there are two ways you can turn Journaling on (the default) or off (better for media drives). First, is when you setup your drive by selecting the appropriate option in the Erase tab.

However, you can also turn off journaling in the Disk Utility by selecting your hard disk then going to File->Disable Journaling, which doesn't involve reformatting your drive and erasing data.

Author:
Larry Jordan is an Apple-Certified Trainer in Digital Media with over 25 years experience as a producer, director and editor. Based in Los Angeles, he's a member of both the Directors Guild and Producers Guild. He's been using Macintosh computers since January 24, 1984, and Final Cut since version 1.0.

[Deal]

Originally Posted by CatOne

Deal, these don't describe "normal" spotlight use. They describe a couple specific instances where people have encountered a bug or a runaway process. It's rare. And these instances are easily detectable by running 'top' or activity monitor... if you see something that has chewed 14 hours of CPU time, it's worth investigating.

My point is, and I'll reiterate it, that normally Spotlight takes very little CPU time. It doesn't bring everything to a crawl. In a week's worth of uptime, mds took a little over 4 minutes of CPU. 'mdimport' will index newly created documents, but it's almost undetectable.

If the importing is hogging huge chunks of time, it's better to find out what's causing the problem, rather than just eliminate the symptom, which is to turn off Spotlight.

Agreed. I shouldn't have said, "The major reason Tiger is slow.", I should have said, "A major reason Tiger can be slow."

It doesn't chew up time on every system. There are actually many instances where it can chew up a lot of processor time. I would say the "bug" mentioned above is rare,but there are so many different ways where files/folders can get touched and then get flagged for re-indexing, repeatedly.

The easiest way to determine if this is a factor (in this particular case) is to turn it off and see if it helps. If it doesn't, turn it back on. Tiger Cache Cleaner is free for 30days and it's very easy to do (well, it's hidden in the instructions but easy to do). If it does help, you know what you're up against.

Sorry if I sounded defensive, but when somebody blurts out that what I said is BS instead of even investigating what I said and assuming it has to be wrong, I get a little know what I mean?

If my system were doing this, I would try it after the usual things didn't help. I WILL be trying this on a 12"powerbook that has the same symptoms. Person loaded Tiger and everything is very slow (as described by the user). If it keeps behaving this way, he'll be bringing it over and I'll post the results here.... with a little for Nexus5 if it works

Deal

[Deal]

Originally Posted by sspire

In the time it will take you to do the research and explore other alternatives, you could have backed up your data, reformatted, partitioned, performed a clean install of Tiger and moved everything you need back on. And it will save you a lot of time in the long run expecially if you're losing minutes which add up quickly out of every hour of every day you stay with your system as it is now.
...

More info:

You mean an Archive Install, right? A clean install is where you completely wipe the drive and you can accomplish most of this (except the partitioning) with a simple archive install without having to restore all the files, reload all the applications, reset all settings and preferences.

It is a good idea and easy to do. Don't forget to delete the previous system folder

[clarkgoble]

One reason is Safari. Sometimes it springs a memory leak. Not as bad as the version under 10.3.8, but still problematic at times. Quit Safari and chances are you'll notice a speed increase. Quitting and then restarting Safari 9/10 should do the trick.

[JellyBeen]

Originally Posted by Deal

You mean an Archive Install, right? A clean install is where you completely wipe the drive and you can accomplish most of this (except the partitioning) with a simple archive install without having to restore all the files, reload all the applications, reset all settings and preferences.

It is a good idea and easy to do. Don't forget to delete the previous system folder

Completely agree.

[callefoss]

Thanks guys. Reinnstalling solved the issue.

[timmerk]

Tiger is bloated and buggy. Go back to 10.3.

[callefoss]

Interesting you mentioned this. I actually did because after reinstalling tiger it frequently gave me the black screen where it says that the computer needs to be restared. Other applications also quit unexpectedly. So I reinstalled Tiger again (fresh) but I still had the same problems. Then I decided to install Panther again and then during the installation I got the black screen again saying that I needed to restart the machine.

After this I have done a full AHT and it found nothing. I did however take out my crucial RAM memory. Now I will do the same test again with them inside and see if AHT gives an error.

Any ideas? I suppose it is the RAM but crucial is supposed to be good RAM. Well OK no one is perfect.

HAs any body tried Memtest. Can I use it on my G5? I read that there was some kind of Kernel Panic which apple was about to fix.

[Randman]

Originally Posted by timmerk

Tiger is bloated and buggy. Go back to 10.3.

There you have it folks. Apple has agreed with this troll and is pulling back all copies of 10.4.

[callefoss]

Alright I am back on Tiger and after running a few things over night it seems as my probelm was releted to bad RAM. How do I prove my crucial RAM is bad other than the AHT and memtest? Any ideas?

Sorry but maybe my question should be posted in the G5 forum...