HD Lockup

[ACS]

Thanks for your excellent explanation. I'm sure that pageouts are at 
fault. However, I'm not convinced adding RAM can eliminate the problem. 
I monitor my RAM usage and pageouts, using MemoryStick and AquaMon, 
both very useful utilities. With 1.25 GBs of RAM, I experienced almost 
no pageouts in 10.1.x. In Jaguar, I see pageouts happening regularly, 
even when I know my RAM isn't fully utilized.

So I think the other part of your explanation, the I/O problem, is more 
on the mark. It would be a drag, however, to place my entire system on 
an external FW HD. Wouldn't that alone slow things down? Maybe Apple 
will figure this one out for the next update.

On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 08:05  AM, arturo wrote:

> 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).