Re: Macintosh Multitasking Performance Sucks?

["Brendan Kidwell-2" <user=1552@nabble.blu.org>]

 On 3/9/08, Kent Borg <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> 
> I am thinking that Mac OS X doesn't multitask so well. 
> 
> My wife has a Macbook Pro 17", about two models back, 2 GB RAM, running 
> Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1 (one major rev before Leopard, whatever cat 
> that is). 
> 
> I am running an rsync backup to an encrypted disk image on a USB disk. 
> I have niced the rsync processes, limited the rsync bandwidth to 5000 
> KBytes limit (which I suppose I am not hitting).  Currently the machine 
> is also running Itunes, Mail, Firefox, X11 Openoffice, plus all the 
> required stuff (Finder, Dashboard, etc.). 
> 
> Problem: Interactive performance is *terrible*. 
> 
> Running top, the idle is usually over 70%. 
> 
> Questions: 
> 
>   1) Am I trashing some key cache?  (How can I avoid that?  The rsync is 
> running slowly enough as it is, but I can slow it down more...) 
> 
>   2) Am I thrashing the disk?  (How do I read the mem usage in the 
> Macintosh top? "wired"?, "active"?, "VM: 10.9G + 140M"?  What does that 
> mean?, is it really running a current 11Gs of swap??  I am running far 
> more stuff on Ubuntu right now and I am using only 1 GB of swap with 
> only 1 GB of RAM.) 
> 
>   3) This seems much worse than Linux, am I tricking myself?  Is 
> BSD/Darwin doing something stupid here??