Migrate User to New Account on Same Machine

[mnewman]

Things seem better now, but somehow this just doesn't look right:

Bleach:downloads mnewman$ uptime
 8:54  up 7 days, 4 hrs, 5 users, load averages: 1.79 1.49 1.38
Bleach:downloads mnewman$ vm_stat
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free:                          25985.
Pages active:                       402153.
Pages inactive:                     270702.
Pages speculative:                   83989.
Pages wired down:                   199900.
"Translation faults":            704617026.
Pages copy-on-write:              26565339.
Pages zero filled:               529770972.
Pages reactivated:                 8968417.
Pageins:                           7644475.
Pageouts:                          2536274.
Object cache: 199 hits of 46322189 lookups (0% hit rate)

So many pageouts....

[hayne]

You get pageouts when the applications you are running need more RAM than is present on the machine. You should watch Activity Monitor to see which applications are taking up large amounts of memory and when the pageouts start.

[mnewman]

^OK. Thanks.

[mnewman]

Interesting, but, so far, inconclusive. I used all the applications I normally use in a day, including Safari, Mail, Chrome with Flash content, Graphic Converter, Google Earth, MS Word, iTunes. XBMC rendering a 720P video, BBEdit, etc.

I was unable to induce more than a single pageout.

By far the champion memory hog is Safari (Safari Web Content). I always open the same nine tabs in the morning and close them one-by-one when I finish reading. With all nine open Safari uses about 500MB of real memory and 700MB of virtual memory. After closing all tabs and with no windows open, Safari continues to consume the same amounts of memory until you run the purge command, at which point it settles down to less than 100MB of real memory.

Perhaps I should split those nine tabs into two sets....

[mnewman]

Pretty interesting exercise. Pageouts continue to climb, but nothing stands out as causing them, except Safari's use of memory. Here's Safari (Safari Web Content) with no windows open:

Real Memory:    568.1 MB
Virtual Memory: 822.3 MB

Here's Chrome with zero windows open, but after viewing a bunch of content heavy web sites, including Flash video:

Real Memory:     58.1 MB
Virtual Memory: 296.0 MB

I'm not sure why I get pageouts when I have 600+MB Free Memory and 1 GB of Inactive Memory. After 20 hours of uptime there are 136,745 pageouts. All but one of these happened when I was away from the machine.

[mnewman]

I know no one is interested in this, but I'm going to keep posting, just for my own amusement.

Almost three days of uptime and just under a million pageouts. I finally got to observe some pageouts. They occurred during one of Safari's "Web pages are not responding" fits. I suspected this situation was either a cache or memory problem. It may be both.

[mnewman]

Yes, the molasses has leaked in again.

After 80 hours of uptime:

• There are over a million pageouts.
• Contextual menus are very slow, usually with a SPOD.
• System menu bar items take three or four seconds to drop down.
• System preferences takes seven or eight seconds to open.
• Window Server creeps up to nearly 10% CPU now and then.
• Safari is frequently complaining about web pages not loading.

I wonder if this is a memory management problem. I just checked and free memory was down to 100 MB. After running 'purge' it is now 500 MB. Contextual menus and system menu items are now responding normally. But, System Preferences still takes eight seconds to open.

Maybe it's just time for a new machine?

[mnewman]

Finally got around to rebooting. One thing odd about this machine that I don't think I've mentioned before is that a Shut Down or Reboot always takes several tries. On the first one a bunch of applications will terminate, but that's it. No notices. Nothing more happens until you select Restart or Shut Down again. Then more applications will terminate. If you go to the Dock, all applications say "Application Not Responding" with a "Force Quit" option.

Anyway, I restarted and booted into single user mode and ran fsck. No problems detected.

So, it will be all good for a few days. System Preferences again opens in a few seconds. Menu Bar items and contextual menus are again instantly responsive.

Zero pageouts so far and almost a Gigabyte of free memory.

I installed SMART Reporter and set it up to do additional testing beyond monitoring the SMART status. Here's a typical report:

Since the last daily status email sent 1 days ago SMARTReporter performed:
 56 S.M.A.R.T. status checks
 0 S.M.A.R.T. self-tests
 4 S.M.A.R.T. attribute checks
 144 I/O-Error checks
 0 R.A.I.D. status checks
 6 Disk-Space checks

Status: OK - SMARTReporter could not find any problems with all 210 checks since the last daily status email.

[mnewman]

Running the "purge" command makes a HUGE difference in performance after a day or so of uptime....

[mnewman]

I used Font Book to check fonts. It found about a dozen duplicates and several possibly corrupted fonts. I deleted them.

The annoying slowdowns seem to have disappeared. Safari now only rarely complains about web pages not responding. Pageouts are less than half what they were before.

I used to see this:

Load Avg: 1.07, 1.10, 1.07 CPU usage: 16.71% user, 7.28% sys, 75.99% idle

Now I see this:

Load Avg: 0.96, 0.81, 0.67 CPU usage: 3.98% user, 3.28% sys, 92.73% idle

However, I have ordered new RAM. I thought this Mac Mini maxed out at 4GB. I see that it can actually handle 8.

[dianeross]

Microsoft Office for Mac installs duplicate fonts. For help deleting fonts for 08 and 11 see Font Management for help:

Office 2011 Duplicate Fonts to Delete

Font Book isn't really smart when it comes to disabling duplicate fonts. If you've been using an older version of a font, it might delete the newer version rather than the older one. FB is a bit like the Keychain... it's needs updating.

[mnewman]

Installed the new RAM. Huge difference in performance.

System Preferences now opens in about a second....

As for fonts, the duplicates were Thai language fonts that were in both ~/Library/Fonts and /Library/Fonts. I deleted the ones in my home directory.

I let Font Book delete the other questionable fonts.

[mnewman]

Uptime: 17 Hours
Pageouts: 0

[mnewman]

Since doubling the RAM (to 8GB) I have not had one single "Web pages are not responding" message from Safari. These used to be a more than daily occurrence.