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MPMoriarty · Dec 11, 2005, 01:45 AM

Ok, I haven't experiened this issue with any other version of Tiger so far. So I am thinking it has to be something with 10.4.3

Every hour or so my hard drive on my iBook starts reading rapidly and slows down the my entire system to the point where I really can't do anything. Then suddenly it will stop reading and everything will be fine.

I thought it might be spotlight's indexing going nuts, but even after I have turned spotlight off, the problem still persists.

Is anyone else experiencing issues like this?

osxrules · Dec 13, 2005, 06:25 PM

Check your SMART status using disk utility. Also check out your drive by using disk utility after starting from your system disc. Flush out your system caches using cocktail or clix. If symptoms continue, then check your list of all running processes in activity monitor to see if there are any apps using a significant amount of virtual memory. If you start and quit memory intensive programs, OS X tries to allocate and free up huge memory files, which results in fair bit of disk activity. Check your page outs to see if you maybe need more RAM. OS X needs an absolute minimum of 256MB.

In 10.4.3, the only change to Spotlight is that it is supposed to be faster. If your Spotlight index got corrupt somehow, you can force it to update:

sudo mdiutil -E /

I'm not sure if dragging your HD into the Spotlight privacy and back out does the same thing.

MPMoriarty · Dec 13, 2005, 10:24 PM

Everything appears to be OK with Disk Utility and no processes are showing up in Activity Monitor. I have booted up and checked everything using DU from CD and got the same results.

Here's an interesting thing...

I have Tech Tool Deluxe and used it to verify my volume structure. It said there was a problem and I told it to fix it. TTD got half way through the process and froze. Hmmm...

Watson · Dec 13, 2005, 10:32 PM

I remember that there were issues with TTD when 10.4 was initially released due to the new case-sensitive filesystem. I have no idea if those issues have been resolved. You should probably check.

wataru · Dec 13, 2005, 10:37 PM

The default filesystem is case-preserving, not strictly case-sensitive. Unless he reformated his hard drive and explicitly chose the case-sensitive HFS+, that shouldn't be an issue.

Unless you mean MicroMat screwed up and put TTD on a case-sensitive CD.

CatOne · Dec 14, 2005, 12:33 AM

Originally Posted by MPMoriarty

Ok, I haven't experiened this issue with any other version of Tiger so far. So I am thinking it has to be something with 10.4.3

Every hour or so my hard drive on my iBook starts reading rapidly and slows down the my entire system to the point where I really can't do anything. Then suddenly it will stop reading and everything will be fine.

I thought it might be spotlight's indexing going nuts, but even after I have turned spotlight off, the problem still persists.

Is anyone else experiencing issues like this?

How much RAM do you have? Any chance there's excessive paging activity? If you run 'top' from the terminal when it's happening, what kind of numbers for pageouts do you see?

MPMoriarty · Dec 17, 2005, 11:42 PM

640 MB.

You know, I never actually looked at how much paging was going on during these weird disk activity moments. I was only looking at CPU usage.

Well, Apple has told me to send it into them. Hopefully they can figure out what's wrong.

nmr · Dec 21, 2005, 03:17 PM

Sorry not trying to hijack this thread, but i have 512mb and still have this prob and my ibook is new less than 3 months

After 10.4.3 i get wierd read write noise, there wasnt any before this. When i run programs and when i hover over the dock. SMART verified, no problems with permissions and others. The only thing i see when i hover over the dock is WindowServer.