Any mac experts out there?

[miles_hot]

My Mac Pro is on most of the time but recently it has been rather slow - when you open finder it takes a while to populate all the file sizes - about 1-2 a second. I am running VMWare to have windows XP and this is fine for a while and then slows to a crawl (2-5 mins to open a window) and then when I restart the XP Instance the ta-dar music at the beginning takes about 10 mins to play, note by note. This is only solved by re-starting the mac.

A week or so ago I got a situation where the mac screen was overl ayed by a grey box which told me I had to switch off the machine at the power button - this happened a few times.

How can I get this 8 core, 8GB ram machine back to it's former powerful self?

Many thanks

Miles

 

[Chris Knight]

Miles, I too have a Mac Pro 8/8 bought in March last year.

You don't really give me enough info to tell me what might be wrong though. I'd observe that Parallels 5 is a lot faster than VM at the mo - (I changed recently for this reason) but as you mention the Finder, it seems to be a general system slowdown.

First, I'd check the obvious by launching disk utility and doing a check/repair on all connected disks. It's dollars to donuts there's some work there.

Second, I'd download the freeware "Onyx" (http://www.titanium.free.fr/index_us.html) back up your boot disk with the freeware Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/) and then use Onyx to do a Spring clean of everything (all caches, history etc.). It has never messed up my machine so I regard it as very trustworthy.

Check if the slowdowns occur with both main and backup disks. If the backup disk is better, just clone that back to your main disk.

If things are still slow, install Intego Virus barrier (or Kaspersky) and have it do a thorough check.

Somewhere along this path of things to do, I think you will eliminate the problem.

 

[RogerS]

I'd go along with Chris' suggestions (although I'd only use Intego if I was really desperate. ClamXav is free and you only need to run it once to check out your system).

The other thing to do is create another user account and try that to see if you get the same problems.

Also fire up Activity Monitor and keep the CPU bar chart visible on top and also the Activity Window. Then when it slows down you might see the bar chart reach maximum. If you have asked the Activity window to sort on cpu then the program that is hogging the cpu will be at the top of the list.

Have you updated anything recently? Often I find it better to run the combo updater rather than a load of smaller updates. Even if you have run the smaller updates, re-running the combo often sorts out gremlins.

How much disk space have you got left?

I am also intensely jealous of you guys having a Mac Pro..especially Mr Knight with his 8/8 :wink: :lol:

This forum is also very good. This thread has some good links

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10991100&#10991100

 

[special bone]

It sounds more like a memory issue than a CPU issue, in particular, it sounds like one of your applications has a memory leak.

Try not running VMware and see if the same thing happens. The machine slowing down to the extent you describe implies that it is using the swap space on disk rather than physical memory.

So, check that you haven't got any failed memory and look for a process that just seems to keep using more and more memory.

 

[miles_hot]

It sounds more like a memory issue than a CPU issue, in particular, it sounds like one of your applications has a memory leak.

Try not running VMware and see if the same thing happens. The machine slowing down to the extent you describe implies that it is using the swap space on disk rather than physical memory.

So, check that you haven't got any failed memory and look for a process that just seems to keep using more and more memory.

How do I check for duff memory? Sorry for the asking what must be stupid questions!

I think that you're right about the lack of CPU issue as the monitor does not show much CPY usage

Miles

 

[RogerS]

Miles

At the bottom of Activity Monitor is the memory usage chart. What is it saying? How much Inactive?

If it was a hardware memory problem you'd be having many more problems.

 

[special bone]

I'll be honest, I've just spent a week on a VMware course so the impact on the memory was still fresh in my mind :lol: .

I've checked on my machine and the process using the most memory is kernel_task, using about 200MB. That's a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. If you can see any process using a lot more than that when VMware isn't running, that's probably your rogue process.

Have you tried checking for software updates?

Rich

 

[miles_hot]

Miles

At the bottom of Activity Monitor is the memory usage chart. What is it saying? How much Inactive?

If it was a hardware memory problem you'd be having many more problems.

Looking on the "system memory" tab I am showing:
Free: 10.37
Wired 2.48
Active 1.55
Inactive 3.95
Used 7.99

Having said that at the moment it seems to be behaving itself. I will wait till it starts messing around and try to remember to record what it is showing then

Miles

 

[miles_hot]

I'll be honest, I've just spent a week on a VMware course so the impact on the memory was still fresh in my mind :lol: .

I've checked on my machine and the process using the most memory is kernel_task, using about 200MB. That's a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. If you can see any process using a lot more than that when VMware isn't running, that's probably your rogue process.

Have you tried checking for software updates?

Rich

In the activity monitor it is showing VM as using 100.09 MB teal memory and 1.08 GB virtual memory. Above that is Safari running 266.10 MB real and 1.40 GB virtual.

I have set VM to use around 2GB memory with two processors so that seems odd that it's using 100Mb and 1Gb. In the past I've had some issues with VM and I may need to do a new VM XP machine as it is still refusing to hold onto the idea of using two displays!

However having said that this is a new issue. The things that I changed in the run up to the current set of issues were (from memory):
Update of sketch up from 7.01 to 7.02 (or was it 7.1 to 7.2)?
Update of nokia tools which had some issues half way through but managed it in the end

When I run sketch up it uses a lot of CPU time (safari is at 6-7 at the moment and VM at 1-6) Just kicked off sketch up and unlike in the past it seems to be below VM and safari- I have seen the CPU time going up to 33 odd (I think)...

MIles

 

[Chris Knight]

When I run sketch up it uses a lot of CPU time (safari is at 6-7 at the moment and VM at 1-6) Just kicked off sketch up and unlike in the past it seems to be below VM and safari- I have seen the CPU time going up to 33 odd (I think)...

MIles

SU can only use one core so its usage is in fact only 33% of 12.5% in terms of your total CPU capacity! It's one of the frustrating things about SU and it can get really annoying when running any complex rubies/big models.

It's quite a treat to see how a program that maxes out all cores runs on a Mac Pro - like some rendering programs can.