Re: OT probably, help please (fwd)

2015-01-22 Thread Dave Horsfall
Oops; this was meant foe the list...

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-- Forwarded message --
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 15:11:06 +1100 (EST)
From: Dave Horsfall 
To: René J.V. Bertin 
Subject: Re: OT probably, help please

Someone mentioned "launchd.info" (and I daftly deleted the message).  
Does it look as wonky for others as it does for me?  I'm using Firefox 
35.0 (haven't tried others, as the last time I did it buggered up a few 
things) and I get, in the top half, a static window with some sort of an 
index and a silhouette of something looking like a watering can, with a 
full-screen scrolling window under it.

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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread René J . V . Bertin
On Friday January 23 2015 08:56:31 James Linder wrote:

> smartctl -a gives zillions of errors eg

>   7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f   081   060   030Pre-fail  Always  
>  -   147598082
> 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   038   025   000Old_age   Always  
>  -   183829319

A zillion is a bit over the top: I see only these 2 indicators that catch 
attention, but without knowing the disk model it's hard to interpret the data. 
port:gsmartcontrol can help with that, btw.

Bad sectors aren't necessarily detected and recorded on the fly, though. I 
always forget if the get stored (and remapped) during the 1st extensive 
self-test after a full disk write or if it's the other way round (last time I 
had to cope with one was about 10y ago) but in your case a full rewrite may not 
be required as long as the disk doesn't spin down after the last error and the 
self test.

Good luck,
R.
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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread James Linder

> On 23 Jan 2015, at 12:42 am, William H. Magill  wrote:
> 
>>> I cannot explain why a (normally) rational, sane thinking idiot did not 
>>> make that his first port of call (beautifully synced)
>>> 
>>> Jan 21 00:04:34 haycorn kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error.
>>> 
>>> Thanks everybody, and sorry for being an idiot
>> 
>> I wouldn't immediately think about disk i/o errors either from the symptoms 
>> you described (not for short freezes in anyway). Not with an hdd anyway.
>> What's in your logs around those I/O error messages, and what do the 
>> smartmontools (in MacPorts) tell about the disk's health? smartctl -a 
>> /dev/disk0 and do run smartctl -t long /dev/disk0 (disabling disk spin down 
>> for the duration of the test as that would interrupt it)?
>> 
>> A bit too many reports of comparable symptoms in 10.9 somehow related to 
>> disk I/O errors for my comfort zone. OS X wouldn't be doing something low 
>> level that somehow stresses the disk hardware I hope?

I confess to bias suspecting yosemite before anything else!
smartctl -a gives zillions of errors eg

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME  FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE  UPDATED  
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000e   078   077   006Old_age   Always   
-   183829319
  3 Spin_Up_Time0x0003   100   100   000Pre-fail  Always   
-   0
  4 Start_Stop_Count0x0032   099   099   020Old_age   Always   
-   1749
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036Pre-fail  Always   
-   0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f   081   060   030Pre-fail  Always   
-   147598082
  9 Power_On_Hours  0x0032   078   078   000Old_age   Always   
-   19827
 10 Spin_Retry_Count0x0013   100   100   097Pre-fail  Always   
-   0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count   0x0032   099   099   020Old_age   Always   
-   1505
184 End-to-End_Error0x0032   100   100   099Old_age   Always   
-   0
187 Reported_Uncorrect  0x0032   001   001   000Old_age   Always   
-   34330
188 Command_Timeout 0x0032   100   100   000Old_age   Always   
-   0
189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a   099   099   000Old_age   Always   
-   1
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   058   040   045Old_age   Always   
In_the_past 42 (3 248 42 24 0)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022   042   060   000Old_age   Always   
-   42 (0 16 0 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   038   025   000Old_age   Always   
-   183829319
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000Old_age   Always   
-   2
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000Old_age   Offline  
-   2
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count0x003e   200   200   000Old_age   Always   
-   0

James
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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread Brandon Allbery
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 2:26 PM, René J.V.  wrote:

> Oh wait, but you're running FreeBSD on it ... O:-)


I read "MacBook with a FreeBSD *server*". I used to run that kind of setup
myself (and am trying to scrounge hardware to do so again...).

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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread René J . V . Bertin
On Friday January 23 2015 05:53:21 Dave Horsfall wrote:

> Hmmm...  I just tried SMART on my drive, but being an external USB drive 
> (long story) it's not supported, so...

Did you try with the SATSMARTDriver I linked to in my previous post?

> I have been seeing slow performance lately; I bought the MacBook early in
> 2010, but it's a late 2009 model.  I wonder?

A late 2009 model can probably no longer be considered fast; if you've upgraded 
to 10.9 or even 10.10 I'd not exclude the possibility that it's simply 
surpassed by a certain number of new features...
Oh wait, but you're running FreeBSD on it ... O:-)

R
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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread Dave Horsfall
On Thu, 22 Jan 2015, William H. Magill wrote:

> After a tremendous amount of effort on the part of numerous kernel 
> programmers at DEC, they discovered that the bottom level BSD I/O 
> modules had not been "looked at" (literally) since PDP days. Disk I/O 
> was being done in 128 byte blocks.

You sure abut this?  My memory of the PDP days (ye olde 11/40) was that 
I/O was the same as the disk sector i.e. 512 bytes; this was V5/V6/V7 
Unix.

> One thing which I noticed immediately when I turned on iCloud disk in 
> Yosemite -- the "lag" involved with launching any program which stored 
> anything "in the cloud." Not unexpected, but significant none the less.

I've never bothered with iCloud; I don't store much stuff anyway (see my 
signature), and it all gets backed up to my Time Capsule.

> Similarly, I had a problem where my internal hard drive would literally 
> not spin-up. Took the iMac in to the Apple Store and they ran their 
> diagnostics and pronounced nothing wrong -- the tests passed with flying 
> colors!
> 
> I finally convinced them that the drive was not spinning up and they got 
> a tech to come out front who had a stethoscope and instantly verified 
> that the drive was not spinning.

Didn't they see the dreaded question mark on booting up?

> I've seen too many cases related to both BSD (and later Mach, i.e. NeXT 
> and OSX) where much of the hardware level "stuff" is completely ignored 
> by any of the upper-level reporting software. -- one of the main reasons 
> why Drive manufacturers developed S.M.A.R.T. -- the OS does not do the 
> job.

Hmmm...  I just tried SMART on my drive, but being an external USB drive 
(long story) it's not supported, so...

> In my experience, by the time the OS flags a Disk error, you have been 
> suffering constant performance degrading failures which are simply below 
> the "reporting threshold", for quite some time.

I have been seeing slow performance lately; I bought the MacBook early in 
2010, but it's a late 2009 model.  I wonder?

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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread René J . V . Bertin
On Thursday January 22 2015 11:05:02 Brandon Allbery wrote:

> I think there are a lot of things one can do that can have the side effect
> of pushing the boundaries of hardware (this includes things like
> compression).

Compression? Depending on what kind and the application, it can also shift the 
burden from (mechanical) peripheral hardware to the CPU.

> Not to mention things like SSD where you are explicitly
> trading lifetime for performance.

Indeed.

> Searching for reasons to believe it's
> just to drive obsolescence isn't particularly fruitful, unless you consider
> paranoia an end in itself.

Oh, I'm not. But I also don't believe in the contrary, i.e. avoiding things 
that give debatable (performance) gains at the detriment of longevity.

> I've seen too many cases related to both BSD (and later Mach, i.e. NeXT and
> OSX) where much of the hardware level "stuff" is completely ignored by any
> of the upper-level reporting software. -- one of the main reasons why Drive
> manufacturers developed S.M.A.R.T. -- the OS does not do the job.

FYI: still doesn't properly, BTW - OS X does not provide SMART status for 
external drives, unless you install an additional kext:
https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver .
But SMART status isn't everything: I've already had issues with a drive or 2 
where SMART considered the drive to be fine while it most definitely wasn't.

William: remember the Quantum harddrives that you had to help spin up when they 
reached a certain age? Other than that they were virtually indestructible :)

R

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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread William H. Magill

> On Jan 22, 2015, at 4:29 AM, René J.V. Bertin  wrote:
> 
> On Thursday January 22 2015 08:56:25 James Linder wrote:
> 
>> I cannot explain why a (normally) rational, sane thinking idiot did not make 
>> that his first port of call (beautifully synced)
>> 
>> Jan 21 00:04:34 haycorn kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error.
>> 
>> Thanks everybody, and sorry for being an idiot
> 
> I wouldn't immediately think about disk i/o errors either from the symptoms 
> you described (not for short freezes in anyway). Not with an hdd anyway.
> What's in your logs around those I/O error messages, and what do the 
> smartmontools (in MacPorts) tell about the disk's health? smartctl -a 
> /dev/disk0 and do run smartctl -t long /dev/disk0 (disabling disk spin down 
> for the duration of the test as that would interrupt it)?
> 
> A bit too many reports of comparable symptoms in 10.9 somehow related to disk 
> I/O errors for my comfort zone. OS X wouldn't be doing something low level 
> that somehow stresses the disk hardware I hope?

Long ago in the days of Ultrix, there were some massive parts of the low-level 
disk-i/o that never saw the light of day.
(Ultrix from DEC being a direct BSD clone.)
None of the hardware level routines were addressed by any of the "accounting 
routines." Made performance look good, but debugging impossible.

Performance was unexplaninedly lower than the new hardware predicted.
After a tremendous amount of effort on the part of numerous kernel programmers 
at DEC, they discovered that the bottom level BSD I/O modules had not been 
"looked at" (literally) since PDP days. Disk I/O was being done in 128 byte 
blocks.
The new hardware had 4096 byte tracks. 
Calculate how many I/Os were required to write a single track!
Increasing the basic block size dramatically cut down on the number of I/Os and 
their consequent overhead - performance improvement was dramatic.

One thing which I noticed immediately when I turned on iCloud disk in Yosemite 
-- the "lag" involved with launching any program which stored anything "in the 
cloud."
Not unexpected, but significant none the less.

Similarly, I had a problem where my internal hard drive would literally not 
spin-up. 
Took the iMac in to the Apple Store and they ran their diagnostics and 
pronounced nothing wrong -- the tests passed with flying colors!

I finally convinced them that the drive was not spinning up and they got a tech 
to come out front who had a stethoscope and instantly verified that the drive 
was not spinning.

I've seen too many cases related to both BSD (and later Mach, i.e. NeXT and 
OSX) where much of the hardware level "stuff" is completely ignored by any of 
the upper-level reporting software. -- one of the main reasons why Drive 
manufacturers developed S.M.A.R.T. -- the OS does not do the job.

In my experience, by the time the OS flags a Disk error, you have been 
suffering constant performance degrading failures which are simply below the 
"reporting threshold", for quite some time.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill

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mag...@mac.com
whmag...@gmail.com








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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread Brandon Allbery
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 11:02 AM, René J.V.  wrote:

> And yes, I do keep in mind that Apple has reasons to drive sales and
> incite people to buy new hardware and is probably not above tactics that
> decrease a product's theoretical lifetime.


I think there are a lot of things one can do that can have the side effect
of pushing the boundaries of hardware (this includes things like
compression). Not to mention things like SSD where you are explicitly
trading lifetime for performance. Searching for reasons to believe it's
just to drive obsolescence isn't particularly fruitful, unless you consider
paranoia an end in itself.

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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread René J . V . Bertin
On Thursday January 22 2015 09:40:28 Brandon Allbery wrote:

> Just for one example (in the area of "complex systems"): HFS+'s hot file
> support is the sort of thing that can exacerbate failing disks... and the
> effect would get worse with certain kinds of changes to what files are
> "hot", which might well cause it to become more evident in a newer OS
> version.

I don't know if the hot file feature is what I was thinking with low level 
operations, but yes, it is something that could exacerbate failing disk by 
concentration frequent read/writes on a specific part of the disk.

> again it'll be too late to save your data. (Yes, yes, have backups ---
> guess what? Backups will *also* make this more obvious. So do you also

I guess you mean full backups which are a way of testing the entire set of 
sectors in use?

> disable backups because "they trigger disk errors"?)

What did you think I was suggesting?

I wasn't. I was asking.
And yes, I do keep in mind that Apple has reasons to drive sales and incite 
people to buy new hardware and is probably not above tactics that decrease a 
product's theoretical lifetime.

R.
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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread Brandon Allbery
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:29 AM, René J.V.  wrote:

> I wouldn't immediately think about disk i/o errors either from the
> symptoms you described (not for short freezes in anyway). Not with an hdd
> anyway.


I would --- but that may be because I've seen it in action (most closely
related to this thread: freezes like that led me to discover that the HD in
my old iBook was kaput).

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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-22 Thread Brandon Allbery
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:29 AM, René J.V.  wrote:

> A bit too many reports of comparable symptoms in 10.9 somehow related to
> disk I/O errors for my comfort zone. OS X wouldn't be doing something low
> level that somehow stresses the disk hardware I hope?


Just for one example (in the area of "complex systems"): HFS+'s hot file
support is the sort of thing that can exacerbate failing disks... and the
effect would get worse with certain kinds of changes to what files are
"hot", which might well cause it to become more evident in a newer OS
version.

And I don't think the right answer here is "simplify" because that just
covers up the fact that it's failing, ensuring that when it becomes obvious
again it'll be too late to save your data. (Yes, yes, have backups ---
guess what? Backups will *also* make this more obvious. So do you also
disable backups because "they trigger disk errors"?)

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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-21 Thread James Linder

> On 22 Jan 2015, at 4:00 am, macports-users-requ...@lists.macosforge.org wrote:
> 
>> 
>> change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then 
>> all is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection).
>> firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 
>> seconds before resuming
>> 
>> Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while 
>> wheel is turning!
>> 
>> system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to 
>> usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause 
>> again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning.
>> 
> 
> What do you see in the system.log when (or after...) one of those "wheelies"? 
> Do you have power napping and what have you active?
> 
> Did you use a 10.10 public beta and upgrade to the release version without 
> doing a clean install?
> 
> I *hate* the app nap and sudden termination features that were introduced in 
> 10.9 (it appears they actually experimented with app nap based on 
> SIGSTOP/SIGCONT ...), and am not really glad with the memory compression 
> features either. There's a defaults command to turn off app nap which I'd 
> advise for anyone rarely if ever running off a battery, but I have no idea 
> about tweaking that memory compression thing. And that's almost certainly 
> bound to slow down operation in a more continuous fashion than traditional 
> swap.


I cannot explain why a (normally) rational, sane thinking idiot did not make 
that his first port of call (beatifully synced)

Jan 21 00:04:34 haycorn kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error.

Thanks everybody, and sorry for being an idiot
James
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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-21 Thread James Linder

> On 21 Jan 2015, at 2:38 pm, William H. Magill  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 20, 2015, at 10:28 PM, James Linder  wrote:
>> 
>> G’day
>> The other day I reported that gnuplot had suddenly stopped working with term 
>> x11 but worked with term aqua.
>> Maybe it was just slow !
>> I have an issue where the system has (suddenly) become very slow …
>> 
>> iMac 27 top:cpu free 99 ish %
>> system-monitor also shows cpu cores at 0% busy
>> men free 8G
>> df 50 ish %
>> yosemite
>> 
>> change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then 
>> all is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection).
>> firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 
>> seconds before resuming
>> 
>> Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while 
>> wheel is turning!
>> 
>> system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to 
>> usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause 
>> again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning.
>> 
>> This seems unrelated to macports. Time machine is on an external USB disk 
>> and scheduled to run now (another pause checks:TM disk definitly NOT busy)
>> 
>> So before I nuke this install, any ideas gratefully acceped
>> James 
>> ___
> 
> Sounds like issues with Anti-malware virus programs. 
> The ones that insert themselves into your tcp/ip data stream to examine all 
> of your traffic so that you don't' download "bad stuff."
> 
> I had to shut off thtat processing in Sophos because it had gotten so bad 
> (i.e. taking FOREVER to load any program that talked to the internet.)
> 
> That was a "sudden" change in how Sophos was working. At first I thought it 
> was  simply because I had turned on the iCloud drive (which does impact 
> things).
> But after a lot of trial and no-luck turned off the option in Sophos.
> 
> Long ago I had tried Avast! and discovered that it's anti-malware was simply 
> horrible in what it did to a Mac.

BSD and linux are pretty much of a muchness here. There are no malware or 
virus’ for either so I don’t do anti-virus, hence it’s not that. Thanks too to 
Jeremy it does not look like appnap stuff. (but it could be)

The whole virus scenario is messy. It has been demonstrated as proof of 
concept. Apple’s forray into Konqueror oops I mean Safari is an example of how 
to do it wrong. You basically don’t need to protect your mac, but someone may 
find a weak spot. Will anti-virus save you? $1,000,000 question.

Meanwhile I s-s-st-stu-stutter along debating nuking this whole install …
James
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Re: OT probably, help please

2015-01-20 Thread William H. Magill

> On Jan 20, 2015, at 10:28 PM, James Linder  wrote:
> 
> G’day
> The other day I reported that gnuplot had suddenly stopped working with term 
> x11 but worked with term aqua.
> Maybe it was just slow !
> I have an issue where the system has (suddenly) become very slow …
> 
> iMac 27 top:cpu free 99 ish %
> system-monitor also shows cpu cores at 0% busy
> men free 8G
> df 50 ish %
> yosemite
> 
> change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then all 
> is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection).
> firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 
> seconds before resuming
> 
> Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while 
> wheel is turning!
> 
> system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to 
> usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause 
> again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning.
> 
> This seems unrelated to macports. Time machine is on an external USB disk and 
> scheduled to run now (another pause checks:TM disk definitly NOT busy)
> 
> So before I nuke this install, any ideas gratefully acceped
> James 
> ___

Sounds like issues with Anti-malware virus programs. 
The ones that insert themselves into your tcp/ip data stream to examine all of 
your traffic so that you don't' download "bad stuff."

I had to shut off thtat processing in Sophos because it had gotten so bad (i.e. 
taking FOREVER to load any program that talked to the internet.)

That was a "sudden" change in how Sophos was working. At first I thought it was 
 simply because I had turned on the iCloud drive (which does impact things).
But after a lot of trial and no-luck turned off the option in Sophos.

Long ago I had tried Avast! and discovered that it's anti-malware was simply 
horrible in what it did to a Mac.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# iMac11,3 Core i7 [2.93GHz - 8 GB 1067MHz] OS X 10.10.1
# Macmini6,1 Intel Core i5 [2.5 Ghz - 4GB 1600MHz] OS X 10.10.1 OSX Server (now 
dead)

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mag...@mac.com
whmag...@gmail.com








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