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Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

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Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#151

Post by pooriaazimi »

Terretta wrote: post #114
jyrki wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the author of the original post) You bring up good points and my article would need some clarification on some parts, I agree on that. I'll just write quick replies back to you, and try to format something on the article itself later. Purge really did free memory and quite a lot. I'm not too expert (as you probably can tell) how the OS X memory management works, but I mostly settled with solutions that seemed to…

I do happen to have an 8 GB machine, and almost never reboot (only reboot for OS updates). I run half a menu-bar full of resident helper apps, like Dropbox (a big one), Fantastical, ScanSnap, Xmarks (another big one), Transmit (another big one), Evernote, and more. I also keep Apple Mail running, mapped to a half dozen Gmail IMAP accounts. I have "geek tool" updating my desktop with iCal appointments and various ps o…

I'm skeptical about your little script (though I too have a lot of heavy apps open all the time and almost never reboot, and certainly have never, ever had any memory-related problems whatsoever).

My MBP has 8 GBs of RAM, and this is what Activity Monitor tells me:

   Free: 2.19 GB
   Wired: 1.01 GB
   Active: 3.70 GB
   Inactive: 1.08 GB
   Used: 5.80 GB
but, you scripts gives me:

   2598.480 MB
Why is that? Isn't Active kinda analogous to -o rss?

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#152

Post by starwed »

beloch wrote: post #3

Last July I bought one of the new Macbook Air's. The price for the hardware you got was unbeatable, and that was ignoring build quality! While previous Air's were anemic tarted up netbooks, the 2011 Air's were (and are) powerful enough for everyday use. There was just one problem with the Air however. Horrible Linux support. I'd been using Kubuntu happily for years. After looking at all the ugly dirty hacks people we…

I wouldn't say the Linux support was horrible. It's a bit of a pain to get it installed to begin with, but that seemed an issue with how locked down macs are...

Once I had Ubuntu running, everything worked out of the box. The main issue was terrible trackpad support -- not that it didn't function, but that it didn't feel even close to right. And a few more complex gestures, like tapping with one finger and then dragging with a second, didn't work.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#153

Post by jakobe »

4ad wrote: post #131
jakobe wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your problem is that you are running out of RAM, Activity monitor will tell you precisely what app is the culprit. Nothing "blunt" there. If you want to know why a specific app is frozen (beachballing), you can click the "Sample Process" button in Activity monitor to perform a time profile. Yes, if you want more details, you have to use Instruments or write your own DTrace scripts. But I doubt that even a time pro…

Sorry, but no, you're just illustrating the problem I've mentioned. In a virtual memory system with on-demand paging, memory mapped I/O, shared libraries and copy on write pages even measuring and interpreting memory stats is very difficult and subtle. The "real memory" column is resident set size, a completely useless metric for the problem at hand because of many reasons. One reason is that much of the physical pag…

You are missing the point. The idea is not to determine exactly what's going on, because that doesn't matter. You mentioned the casual user before, but all these details are only important to specialists trying to debug an issue with a specific application.

When you run out of RAM, it is completely irrelevant which application is thrashing, because the problem is that you run out of RAM. It doesn't matter if the reason is that an app is accessing a memory mapped file or modifying a copy-on-write page, when underlying reason is that you ran out of RAM.

Activity Monitor is perfectly suitable to find out why you ran out of RAM. Oh, Mathematica is using 2GB of RAM? Maybe I try closing that. It doesn't matter if "Real Mem" actually counts some memory twice, it is still a useful measure.

EDIT: Yes, I assumed that the problem is memory pressure. Since this is a common reason for "The whole system becomes sluggish", it seemed reasonable to start testing for this.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#154

Post by sirn »

brcrth wrote: post #148
sirn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they still ship with unusable trackpads (that requires you to carry a mouse everywhere if you ever going to use your ThinkPad) or has that improved in recent years? It's the only pain point against ThinkPad for me.

If you're a programmer using Emacs/Vim you really don't care for trackpad or mouse for the great majority of your computer needs.

The problem is, even with how little I use the mouse (I use Vimperator back then) it's still annoying when I have to.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#156

Post by lloeki »

lrvick wrote: post #100
lloeki wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OSX is certainly a better choice for the pointy-pointy-clicky-clicky masses than windows by far. OSX is not, nor will it ever likely be made for serious hackers or sysadmins that actually care how things work at a low level This is an extremely short-sighted, elitist point of view. Stuff like DTrace are absolutely fantastic and quite low-level, and applications like Instruments are quite helpful. > like to > choose…

A well constructed reply. I probably will not be as organized but here goes: Certainly OSX is becoming a lot more open in some respects. There are clearly some people in Apple that have been trying to make some changes for a while, and I applaud that and hope to see it continue. The fact they ship with a lot of major open source tools makes me happy. Even on my side of the fence I will go as far as to say there are p…

> I probably will not be as organized

Fear not, as your reply is perfectly organized to me :-)

It is all the more interesting because it goes to the point I willfully chose not to make in my previous comments, namely that Mac OS X (in its current form at least) is unfit for most server roles. I think that there is a use case for SOHO and that even then it needs improvements to seriously tackle that area.

For developers and hackers by large it's more than adequate though.

> in response to OS running better on PC hardware than Linux

The exact phrasing would rather be "running better on my PC hardware" :-) as it's of course purely anecdotal evidence.

> I am hard pressed to buy that without more detail of your exact issues.

I started writing something, but it's really growing out of scope, so I will probably end up writing a full-blown post about it (which includes details about window managers)

PS: Awesome rocks and is one of my WM of choice, together with xmonad.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#158

Post by pooriaazimi »

ricky_rozay wrote: post #124
saulrh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LiPo batteries explode if you short them. Doesn't even need to be a very long short, or a very big one. They are incredibly sensitive to fast discharges. Water easily conducts well enough to cause problems, especially if it messes up another power conduit. It isn't guaranteed to catch fire, but the risk is certainly there, especially in such a thin form factor - you don't have much space in there for containment or f…

Id believe it just based on the ridiculous Amount of heat the mac laptops seem to generate. Im constantly turning mine off to cool down

> I'm constantly turning mine off to cool down

use http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol - when the thing gets hot, just increase the fan speed (to 5700 rpm or whatever you machine's max is) for a minute or two, and then everything gets back to normal.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#159

Post by angelortega »

Derbasti wrote: post #118
esusatyo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask if you've upgraded to Lion a few months ago? My 4 years old Macbook was not as bad as you described, but it does become a lot less stable than when it was under Snow Leopard. Even Safari does not work properly in Lion. Snow Leopard was truly very stable, it's the best major version of OS X that I've used. I hope the minor OS X updates will fix out all of the Lion bugs.

yes, I did update to Lion.

So you must swap distributions, or try recompiling the kernel.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#160

Post by zeekay »

jyrki wrote: post #51
lloeki wrote: post #23

Inactive memory is not an OS X specific, and it's actually implemented in a number of other OSes, including FreeBSD. > when it's on disk, it definitely is not made active quickly. If an application is unloaded then many operations need to be taken to initialize stuff, reading the disk for various stuff, processing some data, allocating memory (which will be zeored out, then initialized with whatever struct and data t…

(I'm the author of the original post) You bring up good points and my article would need some clarification on some parts, I agree on that. I'll just write quick replies back to you, and try to format something on the article itself later. Purge really did free memory and quite a lot. I'm not too expert (as you probably can tell) how the OS X memory management works, but I mostly settled with solutions that seemed to…

I have experienced OSX's "swappiness", having gone as far as disabling dynamic paging in an attempt to avoid it. Upgrading memory was the only real solution. A little bit of research would reveal a lot of other people have run into the same problem, you aren't alone at all in that.

I split my time between OSX/Linux and it's pretty obvious to me that Linux is vastly superior in terms of performance, in a wide-range of scenarios. I prefer to use Linux on older and/or memory-constrained systems.

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