> On 4 Apr 2017, at 15:36, Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@macports.org> wrote: > > On Apr 4, 2017, at 02:44, Barrie Stott wrote: > >> I have some questions: >> >> 1. After loading Sierra I noticed that the m/c was slower. Looking at a file >> to display a dozen or so lines in an already open Chrome browser caused a >> pause of several seconds. Bigger but not massive files would cause Chrome to >> ask if it should continue to wait for the file to load or abort the attempt >> for now. Could this be a sign of insufficient memory and, if so, how would I >> find this out? > > I upgraded an older iMac with a hard drive to Sierra yesterday. It was fairly > slow right after the update, but I blame that on the Spotlight index being > regenerated in the background and a new Time Machine backup being completed. > Once those were done, it returned to a more normal operating speed. It still > felt slow to me, but that's probably because I'm used to using a newer Mac > with an SSD. Upgrading the iMac's hard drive to an SSD would surely help. > > If you think you have so many programs running simultaneously that you are > running out of memory, you can open Activity Monitor and check its Memory > section. In the box at the bottom of the window, the amount of Memory Used > plus Cached Files should equal (or at least not exceed) the amount of > Physical Memory. The more Memory Used by active programs, the less memory can > be used for Cached Files, and the more often the computer will instead have > to read files from your disk, which is slow compared with reading from > memory, even if you have an SSD. The amount of Swap Used should be small > compared to your Physical Memory. > > The Memory Pressure graph on the left sums up your memory situation, and if > the graph is green, you're probably fine. If the graph is going yellow or > red, you should run fewer programs simultaneously, or install more physical > memory. > > Things can also slow down if your disk is getting full. macOS is happier when > at least 10% of your disk is empty.
Thank you for this because it is something positive I can work on. I had intended to wait until a friend could come and we could look carefully at what you had written. However it will be a few days before he can come so I’m writing now. Currently I use Spaces and Mission Control and I can see improvement in performance if I get rid of them > 2. I would like to be able to take a requested port and find the tree of > ports that would need to be installed before this port. Does some recursive > way exist to find this out or must I do each step by hand? I presume I must > take account of both build and library dependencies. > > To find the recursive dependencies of SOMEPORT, run: > > port rdeps SOMEPORT > > For example: > > $ port rdeps glib2 > The following ports are dependencies of glib2 @2.50.3_0: > xz > libiconv > gperf > gettext > expat > ncurses > libxml2 > zlib > libffi > pcre > bzip2 > libedit > > If you want a visual representation using Graphviz, we have two scripts: > > https://github.com/macports/macports-contrib/tree/master/port-depgraph > > port-depgraph is the original; port_deptree.py was written later by someone > who probably didn't know we already had one; not sure how the two differ in > terms of functionality. This looks even more useful so I’m extremely grateful that you took the time and effort to write, Ryan. Barrie.
