High Sierra and MacPorts

Thu Oct 12 15:04:17 UTC 2017

I'd love to be proved wrong, but my experience with different Apple devices  says otherwise. iPhone 3GS suddenly got painfully slow after the latest compatible iOS. MacBook5,2 much slower after the latest compatible MacOSX version. iPad 2 much slower after the latest compatible iOS version. Plus the continuing inability to downgrade iOS on many devices. Plus the similar experience of other users on different forums. Plus the ever-increasing price tag of recent devices compared with the older ones, often with reduced functionality (much smaller storage space and no upgrade ability on current MacBooks, for instance - I quickly calculated that getting the same RAM-storage combination on a new MBP would cost at least $700 more than I paid for my "daily driver", including hardware upgrades but excluding an expensive coffee spill.).

I don't believe in conspiracies, but such symptoms similarity between different devices / usage combination across the net is interesting and lead me to think this COULD be intentional. You're right the suspicion itself isn't helpful, but since what I describe is not uncommon, I hope we could pick each other's brain over the problem.

30-40 tabs on Firefox doesn't seem to much on a 8GB-RAM and indeed, memory pressure is most often in the green. Most of tabs are text, maybe 2-3 are video. For reference, on my "daily driver" (16GB-RAM, Snow Leopard) 150 tabs is not uncommon. Still, fan speed is lower, temperature is higher. FWIW, my gf's early-2014 Lenovo (8GB) barely speeds up its fan with her unreasonable 500 tabs (no typo: five HUNDRED, actually ranges from 200 to 700) but otherwise similar usage scenario. All three CPUs have the same safe design temperature  of 105C, and will shutdown with no warning if going over.

TL;DR

Closing FF altogether does help a small bit, but the fan never goes down to minimum speed under light usage (wired network for different shares, Preview opened with 4-5 small PDFs files, LibreOffice for text documents, Mail and iCal). Fan is about 3500-4000rpm @ 63C instead of 6200rpm @ 65C with FF. Or 2000rpm at 60C when closing all applications. There doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between load, temperature and fan speed.

Even when I ran this computer with the top case removed while waiting for a keyboard replacement, fan speed was still often max though temperature was obviously lower.

For sure I don't recall a noisy, hot or sluggish computer in years past under previous Mac OS X versions with a similar usage scenario. I thought about installing Mavericks on a different drive and using it for a while, but for some reason 10.11.6 doesn't recognize an external drive cloned with installer .dmg file to be a valid boot drive - never seen this issue before.

The issue is the fan speed(=noise) and CPU usage (to a lesser degree), not so much temperature.

These symptoms raise more than one hypothesis:
1- Is FF simply better written on Windows 7 than on Snow Leopard than on El Capitan?

2- Is Snow Leopard simply better than El Capitan at managing resources, especially when scarce?

3- Has Apple, voluntarily or not, introduced functions in recent Mac OS X that work well on same-generation hardware but tends to cripple the old?

4- more specifically, would fan speed be set based on the CPU load trend, rather than actual temperature? Assuming "preventive cooling" to be more efficient on recent laptops that have less air flow due to thinness, while having cooler, more efficient CPUs).

5- is the GM version of 10.11 actually different from the regular version?

6- has Apple actually set a lower safe temperature for its MacBook5,2 than it did for the MacBookPro8,1, increasing fan speed starting at an unrealistically low 59C rather than 70C (idle temp is about 55C on both)

Enviado desde mi iPhone

> El 12 oct 2017, a las 4:25, Chris Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> escribió:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 12/10/17 03:27, [ftp83plus] wrote:
>> Already did. No difference.
>> I am beginning to suspect that Apple did this on purpose to push users to buy new hardware. Just as it does crippling iPhone with bloated iOS.
> 
> Please stop make FUD like comments like this, they are no help (and also wrong, but I won't go into that now).
> 
> Have you tried turning firefox off to see what happens ? You said you leave it running with a lot of open tabs. My experience is FF can be a real resource hog.
> 
> Anyway, this discussion is nothing to do with MacPorts so please end it here, and take it to a more appropriate forum elsewhere.
> 
> Chris
> 
>>> El 11 oct 2017, a las 20:18, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> escribió:
>>> 
>>> On October 10, 2017 10:25:12 PM GMT+02:00, "[ftp83plus]" <gestos at ftp83plus.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Still, even with a relatively low temperature (65C-so) the fan spins
>>>> loudly, reaches max speed at 70C (read from CPU diode with Macs Fan
>>>> Control. What is strange is the speed doesn’t seem to be directly
>>>> linked to the temperature.
>>> 
>>> If you haven't tried that already, try resetting your SMC. It has solved similar problems with my MacBook before.
>>> Hi,
>>> -- 
>>> Clemens Lang
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