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Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

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Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#71

Post by malchow »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #44
malchow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!

Store the screen layout using serials from the EDIDs. Why it doesn’t do this and “tries” to guess their position somehow is beyond me. I use the OWC TB3 dock with dual Asus PA328qs with the latest firmware. Because of apparently some lame design decisions, in order to run dual external monitors over a single TB3 port, you need the dock, which has one DisplayPort output, then a TB3-> DisplayPort (via USB-C alt mode II…

The 30 Hz/60 Hz refresh roulette is something I have, too.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#72

Post by polygot »

to3m wrote: post #65
polygot wrote: post #11

On Mac OS 10.4 (tiger) when I left Activity Monitor going in the background for a few minutes and returned to it, sometimes it would all of a sudden refresh the values super super fast with historical data (appearing to catch up on the iterations that it did not display.) On 10.6, when I ran Windows in a virtual machine while it was doing windows update, and left it running in the background for a few minutes and ret…

This still happens for me on OS X Sierra sometimes.

Out of curiosity, is this bug related to CPU cache? I don't know really anything about how CPU's work internally, however. It just "feels like" it's applying a bunch of instructions very quickly but ignoring the internal clock if that makes any sense.

For example, the CPU percentage counter in Activity Monitor was around 3,000,000. If there was a loop to increment the CPU usage counter, it sounds like it incremented it so fast that the thread that reset it didn't run since it wasn't scheduled to run (as it only runs every few seconds.) Again, this is just pure speculation and if anyone knows otherwise please let me know!

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#73

Post by grzm »

gjvc wrote: post #68

Since Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) the quality has declined release by release.

> "Since Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) the quality has declined release by release."

This may be: I'd love to see a comprehensive, in-depth article that digs into this in a quantitative manner. Do you have one at hand? If so, it might make a good HN submission. Just posting this statement at the top level of a post is arguably off-topic and baity. If you could post it on any submission that touches on Mac OS X, it's not really on-topic.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#74

Post by iamdave »

notadoc wrote: post #17
dm319 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what h…

Well this is purely anecdotal, but at least 70% of the developers, IT workers, and researchers that I know are using prior generation MacBook Pro hardware (the ones without the touch bar or terrible keyboard, and with ports) and are intentionally using the older OSX versions. I know several people who traded in 2016/2017 models for 2015 models because it's literally an upgrade; get an older machine and you suddenly h…

> but at least 70% of the developers, IT workers, and researchers that I know are using prior generation MacBook Pro hardware

You can have my 2015 MBP when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

But yes. We recently sold off a bunch of hardware resulting from workforce reductions; I clued a friend in on this and he was begging me to nab him a 2015 MBP. The obsession is real, it is the last truly great Macbook in a while, in my own opinion.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#75

Post by iamdave »

revicon wrote: post #38
jacobsenscott wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple hardware was nice. Not anymore. I had to have the keyboard replaced on my touchbar model. And the 8 Gig memory limit is silly. Thanks to an external keyboard and vagrant I get to spend most of my time on linux with a good keyboard, so it is tolerable for now. I would dump it for a linux laptop, but I work remote so every type of video chat/screen share tool needs to work. Most of them don't work on linux. My co…

And no native Evernote client :(

Still?

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#76

Post by wilun »

dm319 wrote: post #9
notadoc wrote: post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what h…

> Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware?

We are in 2018, not in 1995. You can easily find good desktop and laptop that run fine under pretty much all major distros.

Especially if you compare to MBP & the like, meaning you have no budget issues...

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#77

Post by tomjakubowski »

donatj wrote: post #66
RGS1811 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came for the filesystem bugs, I stayed for the absurd root exploit, but its the little crashes, rendering glitches, and feeling of general instability that made me fall in love with High Sierra...

APFS has been nothing but pain for me. File system changes show up in Finder minutes later! I should have stayed in Sierra.

Unfortunately, it seems Apple has forced us to choose between Meltdown mitigation and a somewhat working OS. The recent Sierra security updates didn’t include the Meltdown patch.

https://twitter.com/theregister/status/949358083431546880

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#78

Post by alwillis »

notadoc wrote: post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

This is why we can’t have nice things--random reports of things not working are pretty meaningless without context.

Yes, it’s fodder to continue to dump on Apple—I get that. But it certainly doesn’t help solve the issue, assuming there’s really an issue in the first place.

For the record, I’ve installed htop many dozens of times using Homebrew on a variety of Mac hardware and operating systems over the years and have never experienced an issues.

After many years of Mac IT tech support, I can tell you: it’s usually what’s not being reported that's the problem.

Was this a clean install or was it upgraded from a previous version of macOS?

Are there 3rd-party kernel extensions installed? Pretty common with antivirus software and hardware drivers.

When’s the last time Disk Repair was run? I’ve seen corrupted/damaged hard drives cause machines to kernel panic or hang.

Did htop ever work correctly? If so, when did that change?

I’d be pretty surprised to hear a new iMac that was unboxed and had Homebrew and htop installed would crash. Actually, if that were the case, they could boot into the recovery partition, format and reinstall.

I clean-installed macOS High Sierra 10.13 the day it was released on a 2009 iMac and have been running the public betas and haven’t had any issues since.

I’m running macOS High Sierra 10.13.3, build 17D29a. I’ve installed 157 command line and 71 GUI applications using Homebrew…

As someone mentioned, it’s only the problems that are part of some narrative that make news; people like me don’t post “Hey—I’m a web developer and I’ve been using High Sierra on a nearly 10 year-old iMac with zero issues, even when running beta versions”.

This doesn’t excuse Apple at all for the bugs and vulnerabilities that have been well-publicized; but lets not make it seem worse than it actually is.

Apple has already starting releasing mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre, like many OS vendors are doing.

I run a FreeBSD server on Digital Ocean; here’s their statement:

FreeBSD was made aware of the problems in late December 2017. We're working with CPU vendors and the published papers on these attacks to mitigate them on FreeBSD. Due to the fundamental nature of the attacks, no estimate is yet available for the publication date of patches.

This is pretty underwhelming, especially given the severity of these vulnerabilities.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#80

Post by city41 »

acdha wrote: post #29
dm319 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what h…

> Given so much unhappiness with OSX Unhappy people post a LOT more and the internet loves a good pile-on. Apple has had plenty of embarrassing QA lapses but the average developer is fine, and it’s not like everything else is perfect. The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin, although there’s a good argument that software compatibility is worth that overhead.

> The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin

This is why I use LTS Ubuntu. I don't do any sysadmin work at all. Every couple of weeks or so a dialog opens up saying there are updates, and I click OK. Everything "just works".

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