Huge system slowdown while installing ports

[Brandon S Allbery KF8NH]

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On 7/31/10 18:57 , Haravikk wrote:
> I've actually always experienced this with Mac Ports, and I'm afraid
> I'm not sure what version I first tried, but when installing ports I
> often find that my system really crawls along at a snail's pace.
> Today I've spent nearly 13 hours installing the wine-devel port, even
> though kernel tasks (which I assume is the relevant process) has never
> gone beyond 15% CPU utilisation, yet light web surfing in Safari is
> sluggish, jerky, and sometimes unresponsive.

"Kernel tasks" would have nothing to do with compilation.  You are looking
for processes named "gcc", 'as", and "ld".

But in any case, the limiting factors for building ports are usually not so
much CPU as they are memory and disk I/O (not disk space, but how often the
disks are having to read/write).

> without having anything to do with the kernel.

That would be tricky, as any file open/read/write (you know, like reading
source code and writing object code) involves the kernel.  However, time
spent in the kernel on behalf of a process is accrued to that process.  If,
as I suspect, "kernel tasks" is pid 0, then it's collecting *idle* CPU time
and is completely irrelevant here.

- -- 
brandon s. allbery     [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]      allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university      KF8NH
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