On 10 Dec 2017, at 21:31, Charlie Garrison wrote:
On 11 Dec 2017, at 13:14, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
Seems like an improbable subject line--but is anyone else who uses
MailMate on High Sierra/APFS suddenly having serious Time Machine
performance issues? I am, on two different laptops. An iMac, which
has a hard drive and hence HFS+, is not having any trouble.
Time Machine is working normally for me.
You didn’t see what your Time Machine destination is. That would be
my first suspect.
I see it to two different external USB disks and to an USB drive
connected to an Airport. This is two different machines; both show the
problem going to either of their destinations. On the newer laptop, the
disk (and the hub it's normally plugged into, via a Thunderbolt dock) is
USB-3; the older laptop is USB-2 only.
The overall symptom is that backups take *many hours*, with sudden,
inexplicable stalls. I say "inexplicable" because Activity Monitor
shows essentially no CPU, network, or disk activity -- but the backup
just *stops*. I normally don't run MailMate on one of the laptops;
its backups complete in a rational amount of time. When I do, it sees
the same stalls. In fact, I'm running MailMate on it right now so
that I can see what happens on my primary laptop when I exit
MailMate. Sure enough, that machine is now behaving.
Note, TimeMachine takes a snapshot when backing up APFS volumes, so
there “shouldn’t” be any difference with MailMate running or
not. I suspect that’s really a symptom of what the real problem is.
I was unclear. The issue is not whether MailMate is running during the
dump; rather, it's whether MailMate has run and therefore received mail
and modified directories.
My suspicion is that the problem has to do with very large
directories on APFS file systems, but I don't know that for sure. I
have some very large mailboxes, though, and these are of course
active when MailMate is running. And of course, that doesn't explain
why I don't see any system activity.
Due to the way APFS works, I’d be surprised if that’s the issue.
I don't know the technical details. I guessed at that because it's the
major difference between the laptop and the iMac.
Is anyone else seeing this? Does anyone have any work-arounds, other
than "don't have such large mailboxes" or "don't run APFS"? I do have
a new laptop on order; I'm seriously tempted to reformat it as HFS+
before I start using it.
If that new laptop has an SSD, then APFS is your only choice.
Hmm.
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