From: Nicholas Clark Date: 10:14 on 18 May 2004 Subject: OS X This is an "idle" machine: Load Avg: 1.19, 1.26, 1.16 CPU usage: 22.6% user, 77.4% sys, 0.0% idle W.T.F? It's spinning the hard disk like crazy, yet I'm not doing anything. The only way to get it out of this mess is to reboot. This hateful state appears to be related to the spontaneous logout on screen unlock bug (which I wasn't going to hate because it didn't kill my local screen session) Maybe I need a RealOS that grasps the true meaning of "idle". Only it wouldn't grok the power management as well. But not making the HD do whirling dervish impressions would save far more than the the other losses. And I'd get a decent dynamic linker for free. Mmmmmm. Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 10:40 on 18 May 2004 Subject: Re: OS X On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 10:14:15AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: > This is an "idle" machine: > > Load Avg: 1.19, 1.26, 1.16 CPU usage: 22.6% user, 77.4% sys, 0.0% idle > > W.T.F? It's spinning the hard disk like crazy, yet I'm not doing anything. > The only way to get it out of this mess is to reboot. This hateful state > appears to be related to the spontaneous logout on screen unlock bug > (which I wasn't going to hate because it didn't kill my local screen session) Aha. I have found the cause of the hate. Firstly my diagnosis of the source of the noise was wrong - it was the fan doing UK government impressions. Implication, 100% CPU, rather than the VM system going swaptastic. And indeed it is related to the spontaneous logout hate, and the screen session still running. The hateful spontaneous logout causes the X server to quit. This kills the xemacs X window, leaving the main xemacs running in the screen session. Only it seems that hateful xemacs goes into an infinite spin if you kill its connection to the X server unexpectedly. (Found this with xemacs on Linux too). [And why am I running xemacs - because emacs hatefully defaults Meta G to "set face", and it's a prefix key so I've not figured out how to kill kill kill that and replace it with something useful - goto line. Dear hateful RMS, how many times a day do I need to set the face? And how many times do I need to go to a line? Style over substance. Hateful] So, hateful xemacs is doing this: 682 xemacs-21.4.9 CALL select(0x7,0xbfffe530,0xbfffe5b0,0xbfffe630,0xbfffe51 8) 682 xemacs-21.4.9 RET select 1 682 xemacs-21.4.9 CALL select(0x7,0xbfffe530,0xbfffe5b0,0xbfffe630,0xbfffe51 8) 682 xemacs-21.4.9 RET select 1 as fast as it possibly can, so in a minute of so of tracing it I see: kdump | grep RET | grep -c select 4237063 and I have to kill kill kill it. And no I'm not using vi instead of x?emacs, because I hates it more. Nicholas Clark
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 18:33 on 18 May 2004 Subject: Re: OS X > the screen session. Only it seems that hateful xemacs goes into an infinite > spin if you kill its connection to the X server unexpectedly. Ah. It's not OS X hate, it's Bad X11 Application hate. We get this on Tru64 on a regular basis. I hacked up a daemon at one point that checked for the top CPU process and kills it if it's on a short list of hateful apps.
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 21:00 on 18 May 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Peter da Silva wrote: >>the screen session. Only it seems that hateful xemacs goes into an infinite >>spin if you kill its connection to the X server unexpectedly. > > > Ah. > > It's not OS X hate, it's Bad X11 Application hate. We get this on Tru64 on > a regular basis. I hacked up a daemon at one point that checked for the top > CPU process and kills it if it's on a short list of hateful apps. Sounds familiar... CPU hog daemons looking for rampant emacs, xlock, netscape. Also lynx (I think lynx had explicit code to IGNORE segfaults.) Or was it pine? The memories are becoming mercifully distant...
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 18:29 on 18 May 2004 Subject: Re: OS X > Load Avg: 1.19, 1.26, 1.16 CPU usage: 22.6% user, 77.4% sys, 0.0% idle > > W.T.F? It's spinning the hard disk like crazy, yet I'm not doing anything. Obviously you are doing something, the only question is figuring out what that is. Why don't you look at "top -u" to see what beggar is responsible?
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 00:05 on 18 Sep 2005 Subject: OS X Give my my fucking keyboard back. Hateful thing. Sits there teasing me with a keyboard viewer showing the keys I'm pressing, but all the bloody apps ignore it. Well, except the Dock that still lets me Command-Tab task switch. But what's the point of task switching when every other app is singing the la-la song at me? Grrr. Debian will install on this hardware, you realise? If you continue to misbehave you'll be replaced by numerous small shell scripts. Nicholas Clark
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