[CUBE] Spinning beach ball

[Arturo Pérez]

On Sunday, December 1, 2002, at 01:01  PM, ACS wrote:

>> When ripping, any other program which tries to use the hard disk will 
>> stall
>> out for several seconds at a time, usually with lots of spinning 
>> beachball.
>>
Do you have your drive partitioned or one big partition?  Are you 
paging when this happens?  This has happened to me when I tried to send 
all 2,000 of my photos to picture ordering service in iPhoto.

If your box starts paging(1) then several bad things can happen:

1) Your drive essentially goes ballistic trying to manage the I/O 
required to support paging AND the I/O required to do whatever it is 
you actually care about such as ripping.

2) The OS will start allocating space on the drive to hold the paged 
information.  If you're using one partition this can fill up your 
drive.  People have lost other files (like preferences) when this had 
happened.  At least, that is what's claimed on one of the OSX hint 
sites.

These days the easiest way to fix this problem is to get more RAM.  If 
you can't do that then, for Jaguar, the best bet is to put the O/S onto 
its own disk (not just partition).

If you can you may want to try and get an external FireWire drive to 
work on.  This will separate the I/O that you need to do for work from 
the I/O that the O/S needs to do to keep functioning well.

1 - Paging. def:  When you need more memory than you have RAM then the 
O/S will "page" data out to disk (i.e. write data) that is not 
immediately needed.  Sometimes the way the O/S figures out "not 
immediately" doesn't work well.  Then you have data that is constantly 
being read then written right back out.  This hammers your drive and 
assures that almost no "real" work gets done.