[X4U] ceasles spinning disk

[Stroller]

On 4 Sep 2007, at 17:16, Jan Melichar wrote:
> A while back a number of people commented on my problem and I think  
> that I have traced it to iCal. I now have 2GB of memory on the G5  
> so the spinning disk and slowing down is less of a problem but on  
> the office G4 with 1GB memory the problem starts the moment I  
> launch iCal and goes on for a good 15 mins. According to the  
> Activity Monitor SynchServer goes into overdrive. In the case of  
> the G5 it swallows up  95% of the CPU (in the top pane) or 45% user  
> (in the lower pane).

Hi there,

I suggest that on each machine you synchronise you open iCal &  
"export" (from the file menu) each schedule as a .ics file. This is a  
"plain text" version of the iCal database (you need to manually  
export a separate one for each iCal calendar). Delete all computers  
from your dot-Mac account and clear all data from it. Delete all your  
calendars in iCal & reimport them from the .ics files. Try again  
synchronising them.

There are instructions in Apple's user-support forums on how to clear  
out the iCal database by deleting the appropriate files & directories  
within "~/Library". Likewise for the iSync cache. It is quite a chore  
to undertake all this, but I have found it solved synchronisation  
problems for me in the past. You should do all this before posting  
again further.

My guess is that the underlying problem is that the iSync service is  
so slow & rubbish. This is surely down to Apple's servers, as I have  
always known everyone complain about it over the course of a number  
of revisions of OS X. My own tests involved using my desktop to place  
a single PDF file (of a few hundred k in size) into my dot-Mac iDisk  
(or whatever they call it) and synchronising that across to my  
laptop. After hitting the "Sync now" button several times,  
alternatively on each machine, and waiting for the "sync" to finish  
the PDF file had not shown up. I was pretty pissed off by this stage  
& gave up in disgust; the PDF file had not turned up the next day and  
when I noticed it there on my laptop it was already far too late to  
save my opinion of dotMac.

I have to admit that synchronisation of iCal appointments did always  
go pretty smoothly for me - much better than the PDF file I just  
described. Usually I could simply enter an appointment on my desktop  
PC, hit "sync", and whilst I was getting ready to go out that would  
finish so that I could hit sync on the laptop. Most always the  
appointment would appear (fairly) immediately on the laptop - the  
problem was that when it didn't I'd often end up on the other side of  
town, opening my laptop and looking for the street number only to  
find no details of the customer (keeping the address & phone number  
of the customer in the iCal entry).

Now I manage my schedules by exporting my schedule (as I described in  
my first paragraph) and transferring the .ics file to the other  
machine. This isn't proper "synchronisation" as it doesn't properly  
merge schedules - I need to always remember which computer holds my  
current "master" iCal schedule, lest I overwrite the wrong one.  
Mostly this means I just make all entries on my desktop and transfer  
a copy of the schedule to my laptop (so I can read-only entries  
whilst I'm out), but if I add an entry in my laptop I need to  
remember to make a transfer to my desktop before adding entries to it  
(or changing any existing ones).

In my house this works pretty well because email sent to my own  
addresses never leaves the house - there is no upload & download to  
an external mail server, so the message (and attachment) appears  
immediately in my inbox. It is indeed more fiddly - to export, drag &  
drop the file, transfer it between computers, drag & drop the file  
again before finally importing it - than it is to click a single  
"sync" button, but I have found this method works for sure everytime,  
so it is worth it for me.

Stroller.