Huge system slowdown while installing ports

[Scott Webster]

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> Ah, ok. Sounds like you have an extremely well-equipped Mac. And with this additional data, it sounds like there may be nothing wrong at all. You may just have had a bucketload of outdated ports that needed to be updated and it just took awhile. 13.5 hours still sounds like a lot to me, but I didn't see the whole list of ports that were outdated so I don't know.
>
> Many ports can't take advantage of additional cores. Some software doesn't have that many non-interrelated things to compile. Other ports have parallel building turned off entirely because the software's Makefiles are broken and fail when building in parallel.
>
> So you may be seeing the effect of just one or two jobs happening at once. Spread out over all your cores, it may not look like much in, say, Activity Monitor. I've noticed this too on an 8-core hyperthreaded Mac (16 virtual cores shown in Activity Monitor).
>

Right.  I think I agree with all the discussion, the thing I don't
understand is the thread title.  I would necessarily expect a computer
like this to experience a "huge slowdown" when updating ports,
ESPECIALLY if it wasn't actually using all the cores... ?

Scott