OT: Mac OS X question . . .

[BumbleBeeDave]

I'm currently using Disk Warrior, but it just rebuilds the index--doesn't actually defrag the hard drive. My understanding is that rebuilding the "index" in OS X is the equivalent of rebuilding the desktop in OS 9. It's the file that tells the computer where to go to get things on the drive.

Our IT guy at work tells me that you don't need to defrag the drive with OS X, but I still don't understand how simply rebuilding the index would get around the problem of files getting more and more fragmented as there is file turnover on the Drive--and there's a LOT of file turnover on my drive.

Anyway, as my drive goes longer and longer without defrag, I keep getting the "rainbow spinning pinwheel of death" more and more. This particularly happenes in Photoshop, and photo files are exactly what has the high turnover on my machine.

I'm assuming this is because the drive is getting more and more fragmented. Would that be right? If so, what's the best utility to get that will rebuild the index and defrag the drive?

I'm also looking for the best utility to get that combines virus and spyware checking, with options for both scan on demand and auto scanning of incoming data.

I'm grateful for any suggestions anyone can offer. I'm running Mac OS 10.4 Tiger right now.

Thanks!

BBD

[dauwhe]

The interweb turned up:

http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php

--one of the other Daves

[sg8357]

To help Photoshop, have the scratch disk on a seperate hard drive.
You erase the scratch disk, excellent defrag technique. ;-)

Scott G.

[benb]

Defragmentation is essentially a Microsoft Windows legacy of the past.. despite what the companies who sell defrag products tell you, you shouldn't really need it on OSX.

Heck you are not supposed to need it on new versions of Windows when using NTFS either. The OS is supposed to maintain the filesystem in a defragmented state by itself. (Regardless of what someone else's product tells you)

You may have another problem... I do a lot of photoshop & have plenty of file turnover and I've got no "pinwheel" issues at all, I've never used Disk Warrior at all. (And actually at work I do software development, thousands and thousands of file turnovers every day, on Windows, with no need to defragment so far in over a year on the current install)

If you've got a real filesystem problem when you reboot the system is supposed to be running "fsck" while the pinwheel runs in the background.. that should be all the "fixing" you need. If the system is severely screwed you will have to boot into single user mode just like any other Unix operating system and run fsck yourself and manually instruct it what to do with the errors on the disk.

Disk Warrior, etc.. are left over vestiges of OS9... not necessary by any means but reassuring to OSX users who come from a Mac OS background as opposed to a Unix background.

[BumbleBeeDave]

What exactly is "fsck?" Is that an application? Is there somewhere in the system prefs that I can check to see if it's running, or tell it to run?

What other problem might I have?

BBD

[davep]

Not to ask the obvious, but have you rebooted? My Mac slows down sometimes and a reboot solves many mysterious problmes. Have you run Disk Utility to repair permissions or check and repair your disk? Its in Applications>Utilities. You will need to boot from another drive to run Verify/Repair Disk. May not do much, but its a good place to start.

[sg8357]

What exactly is "fsck?" Is that an application? Is there somewhere in the system prefs that I can check to see if it's running, or tell it to run?

What other problem might I have?

BBD

fsck = file system check in unixese

mac style, boot from the OS X install disk.
from the menu you can run Disk Utility, which has the option
to check and repair file system problems.

Scott G.

[BumbleBeeDave]

I reboot every morning when I sit down at my desk. I also repair permissions several times per week.

BBD

[benb]

Sorry if my answer got a bit too technical... the short version of what I said was "Seek the answer elsewhere".

There is likely some other issue causing the "Pinwheel" to show up, as opposed to disk fragmentation or filesystem permission issues. You should not need to be running "repair permissions" on a regular basis either. Perhaps the only time that should need to be run is after you install or uninstall an application, or if *you* are running system administration tasks or scripts which affect filesystem permissions.

Examples of items that could be causing the pinwheel...

- Short of memory... #1 cause of this inon any OS.. you're just swapping to disk, system performance cannot be maintained in any OS once you've exhausted memory.

- Are any of your drives external? I see pinwheels sometimes when accessing firewire drives, especially if the drive is a poorly behaved cheapo model.

- Hate to say this but running "repair" utilities can sometimes make things worse.

Given plenty of memory, a healthy starting point, etc.. you should not need to be rebooting an OSX machine on a regular basis or running any of these utilities yourself at all. The OS automatically schedules some maintenance tasks to run in the middle of the night...

As an example my Mac Pro is a year old, it's never been rebooted at any time other then apple's required reboots for updates and firmware upgrades and power outages. It never pinwheels, it's never had disk warrior or anything else run. I had to run fsck manually once after a power outage. Photoshop and Aperture are my biggest workloads on that machine. I'll leave it running over a month without a reboot with no perceived performance problem.

There is an unfortunate side effect of both Windows and Mac OS finally becoming stable operating systems after all these years... many of the companies that produced "repair" utilities are threatened as their applications are no longer needed or in some cases even beneficial.

[BoulderGeek]

Benb gets it.

I think one of the issues present is that Mr. BBD is approaching OS X from the perspective of a Windows user. That is, it was and is incumbent on the Windows user to be an ardent systems administrator, and use utilities and effort to compensate for the poor design of the OS.

There should be no need to saturate your modern Mac with such anachronistic acrobatics. Buying and running Mac "virus scanners" and spyware tools is completely unnecessary. This is just an attempt by Symantec and others to make money off of the naivete of "switchers" who feel this is necessary.

You only need virus and spyware protection on your Mac if you are running an instance of Windows, whether via Boot Camp or in Parallels.

Also, to reiterate, UNIX filesystems (ufs, ext2/3) do not need to be defragmented. Your Mac is running HFS+ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus) , which (in my opinion), isn't as robust as journalled UFS. But, it is there to preserve some arcane Mac hostorical architecture, which can be researched on Wikipedia if one really cared. You should check to make sure that your drives are using journalling, however. This will make file system checking less likely and help to preserve data in case of a fault. Wikipedia states (which was a new tidbit for me): "With Mac OS X v10.3, all HFS Plus volumes on all Macs are set to be journaled by default."

I am running and typing this on a 2001 Titanium powerBook 550. It started off on 10.1 and is now up to the current 10.4.10. Such manual interventions have not been necessary for me.

If you absolutely feel the need to tinker, I'd suggest using Onyx (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html) to control your sysadmin activities. In my opinion, if you're not comfortable firing up Terminal.app and using UNIX utilities, the you really shouldn't be messing with system internals.

As Benb mentioned, I would initially look to physical memory starvation. You haven't mentioned how much memory you have, what system it is (legacy Motorola G4/5 or newer Intel), what disks are in it, etc. These details may be relevant.

Essentially, if you are running less than a gigabyte or memory on anything these days, be it OS X or Windows 2000/XP, you're running low on physical memory under work loads. I'd look for 1.5GB of physical memory or more if one is running Vista.

I have 768MB on this PowerBook, and it isn't enough when editing photos or video. I have 1GB of RAM on the G4 Mac Mini I have on my HDTV, and it never beachballs. But, I only really run Firefox and Mail on that one.

So, I really don't have any concrete advice other than to load your Mac up with as much RAM as you can. Make sure that you haven't had a hardware failure to your memory slots (as can happen with certain firmware updates). Check "About this Mac..." in the Apple Menu in the upper left corner, and verify how much memory the system currently sees.

[benb]

BoulderGeek... Mac OS now runs a file system called "Mac OS Extended" which does happen to be journaled, so even that issue is solved pretty well. My old G4 and my Mac Pro both came setup this way out of the box.

For more clarification on why running "fix permissions" is nearly always useless, consider if you haven't significantly altered security settings, on the default out of the box setting no program is even *capable* of modifiying the permissions on system files unless it pops up the security dialog box and you put in your password.

I don't think it's totally an issue of people "switching". Older versions of Mac OS were just as bad if not worse then Windows.. at least for the period from Windows 95 forward.

[BoulderGeek]

BoulderGeek... Mac OS now runs a file system called "Mac OS Extended" which does happen to be journaled, so even that issue is solved pretty well. My old G4 and my Mac Pro both came setup this way out of the box.

That's just a new marketing term for HFS+, I believe. Same, same.

I don't think it's totally an issue of people "switching". Older versions of Mac OS were just as bad if not worse then Windows.. at least for the period from Windows 95 forward.

Well, that was HFS, which wasn't terribly good (but still slightly less likely to lose its mind than FAT and FAT16). I do think that there is a legacy of needing to manually intervene to keep Windows running. OS X doesn't require that, but Windows still does. So, people with Windows experience assume they need to noodle about with defrag and chkdsk. But, as we know, that isn't the UNIX way.

All of the big iron running your bank's databases, your hospital's MRI data storage, etc don't need to defrag. There are UNIX machines with five year uptimes (sans reboot). Windows NT/2000/XP can't go more than 48 days without a reboot, by design.

So, yeah, Benb and I both agree, noodle with the disk less, and add more memory if you are experiencing swap disk thrashing.

[fhernandez1960]

PS wants to be fed memory!. Run the Activity monitor when you are getting the beach ball and look at the % free at the bottom to see if you are consuming most or all of the available free memory. You can run terminal from the applications/utilities and run the command /usr/bin/top. That will give you an indication of process memory utilization too. In particular look at the swapping activity pageout 0(0). If there is a high count there, it is an indication of not enough memory available and thus the system needs to write chunks to disk.

Francis.

[BumbleBeeDave]

. . . for all your input!

I have 1gb of memory of this machine and I guess for the present I'll keep the activity monitor going and see what the free memory looks like on a continuing basis.

If the OS automatically defrags, then that's great. I hadn't realized that.

I'm still not convinced, though, that I don't need to have some sort of anti-virus, anti-spyware application. There ARE Mac viruses and spyware out there . . .

BBD