MacPro HD CHURNING (EXPERT HELP 2 year old problem)

J

jonathan_david

Hunter
Hi All.

I have had a persistent problem from Parallels 5 with my WinXP BootCamp install that I was accessing with a virtual machine on Snow Leopard on through - now - Win 7 BootCamp that I am accessing with a virtual machine on Snow Leopard.

In the former case an actual drive was dedicated to XP (500 GB) and I accessed it from the 500 GB drive with Snow Leopard.

Apparently the 500 GB drive with Snow Leopard was failing (Mac Store)- and now I have a new 1TB drive dedicated to Win 7 and a new 1 TB drive dedicated to Snow Leopard.

I should note that I still have the 500 GB drive with the Win XP Boot Camp but that I have deleted the virtual machine for this drive because accessing it now (as it had in the past) ground the machine to an almost complete halt with a constant churning. I should also note that it seemed odd to me that the drive with the 500 GB Snow Leopard install would be the one that failed as I originally used the machine for almost 3 years with only the 500 GB XP Boot Camp and had only been using the one with Snow Leopard for roughly a year.

The problem I still have seems to be a CHURNING of the Hard Drive. This starts to slowly crank down on the computer's responsiveness and I am wondering if there are culprits that I should look for in Activity Monitor, if I should exclude the VM from some kind of indexing or what. This ONLY seems to happen when I have the Virtual Machine started and have opened Windows 7. I hear the same sound when Mac is running a Time Capsule backup (and the same kind of slowdown) but I can obviously stop the Time Machine backup.

Can someone please help?! I have been on and off with the Technical Experts for about a year now on this and it seems maddening that I can't get this addressed properly. I have a completely new drive and am running Parallels 6 which I bought the moment that it came out in the hopes of solving this SPECIFIC issue.

Pretty please?

Thanks,

Jonathan
 
If you're comfortable using a terminal window, you may get some clues by running opensnoop. It will show each file open as it occurs and which process is doing the open. It won't be helpful if the system is churning on the same, already open file(s).
 
Hi. Many thanks.

Is it possible for me to ask you to take a look at screenshots of Activity Monitor when this was happening? I can take a look at opensnoop as well (is this existing software or something I d/l?). Is it something you recommend running when I /don't/ hear the churn and am not getting the slowdown?

I always see a prl_vm file when this happens but of course I don't know if this is normal.

Also, my tech guy is never around when this happens, I have to pay him and I don't know his total familiarity with actually running Parallels.

Would it be more convenient for me to post these images somewhere and if so can you recommend? It is a bit of a pita (on top of a pita) to have to upload these to ftp and then enter the url for each.

Thanks,

Jonathan
 
It occurred to me after the fact that my previous post was pretty simplistic. And, running opensnoop is premature.

There are many things that could be causing the disk to be constantly busy. For example, my previous silver-keys MBP was maxed out at 3G of memory. Whenever I had both Safari and Windows XP (under Parallels) running, i would run out of usable ram and OS X would begin swapping to disk. I started always running Activity Monitor with the Dock Icon showing memory usage. You will not experience memory problems as long as you have "good sized" green and blue wedges showing. The amount depends on what kind of work you're doing on the machine.

The first thing to check is the "System Memory" window in Activity Monitor. If the "Page Outs" number is high and more importantly growing, then you would benefit from more memory. Add the "Real Memory" column to your activity monitor display and sort on that column to see what processes are the pigs.

I was surprised to see very high CPU usage for Finder in some of your screen shots. Any idea what's causing that?
 
Hi. A ton of thanks for this.

It has been about a year and a half since I started porting my MacBookPro and my MacPro to Mac with Parallels. This has been a real beast of a job and I won't go into details but this issue has long been a problem and now that I am fully on Win7/Parallels 6 (and my head is clear) I would dearly love to troubleshoot it.

Can I /please/ ask you to walk me through the steps you recommend above. Like step by step?

For instance is Activity Monitor with Dock Icon showing memory usage something I can just set up right now in Activity monitor? How do I set up the Real Memory column?

I have a black keyed MBP with 4GB of RAM. Is there a way I can allocate more RAM to the VM or do you think I should get more RAM? I also have a MacPro with 5 GB of RAM. Do you think I can allocate more RAM to the VM or do you think I should get more RAM? The tech guy that does all my stuff was definite on the fact that I didn't need more RAM.

Sometimes I run a 3D modeling program in Win 7 and I also have - say - Filezilla, Adobe Elements 3, Postbox (email), Numbers, Pages and probably a couple other things open.

I /have/ noticed this sometimes happens late in my workday...

I also have noticed that I have to turn off Time Machine because it slows me down and I sometimes hear the churning when it is working.

I think the FINDER issue has been constant and I'd love to figure out why this is the case. I SHOULD say that the churning issue is only on my MAC PRO. I guess I forgot to make that clear in the above. I DO find annoying hangs on the MBP but these are the colored beachball kind. My MacPro sometimes grinds to a halt even now that I am on Win 7 and Parallels 6 which really has me sort of po'd now that I think about it.

THANKS!
 
You're running some pretty demanding applications. I'd be shocked if you aren't swapping. It's easy enough to check and if you are, you'll get a huge boost by adding more memory -- assuming that you aren't maxed out.

In Activity Monitor, click: "System Memory" [arrow] and watch: "Page outs" when your system has heavy, unexpected disk activity.

am1.png


My memory usage in this image is unusually low because the machine was recently rebooted and I haven't done any real work yet...
 
Hi. Thanks so much. I'd dearly love to get out ahead of this.

So, right now it is around noon and I have not started to work on the computer today. I have Safari, Postbox, iTunes, Activity Monitor, and Parallels open but nothing running in it.

I have the attached image as a screenshot.

Do you mind walking me through what you see and what you think I should be looking for by way of MB and GB or whatever, and then I can sort of slice and dice this with a Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sort of understanding?

I mean, I can envision starting Aperture which has gaboodles of photos in it - and then watching and listening.

Starting the Windows 7 - watching and listening.

Starting 3D software in Windows 7 - watching and listening.

Am I starting to get the picture...?

Thanks!
 
I don't think your image made it...

But you're certainly understanding. The only thing to watch as you start all of those activities is the circled number (Page outs). If the number grows when you start a new activity, more memory will help. If it grows non-stop, you're seriously short on memory. For example, I've been doing real work for a few hours now and my number is still zero -- running XP, iTunes, Mail, Safari with 29 tabs across 5 windows, Word, Entourage, Preview, iChat.
 
Hey Man. I forgot to hit upload.

Can you walk me through what you see in these two?

You know - like if I was a very intelligent monkey? Still very dumb but able to follow if you carefully walk me through?

I would really love to start tracking this a little more intelligently...

Thanks!
 

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Hi. Can I please also ask you to take a look see through this image??

Also, is there some value that I should not see prl_vm go above or is this a pretty normal thing to have going?
 

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The "page outs" value counts up for as long as the computer is turned on. So 1G of pages over the course of a week of uptime isn't so bad. If the time between the two screen shots is short -- like seconds to a couple of minutes, then you're definitely waiting for the system to free memory.

I've read some of Apple's documentation on what the 4 categories of memory mean but some of what I've read doesn't mesh with my observations. To paraphrase, the Free (green) memory is sitting there unused and is available for anything that requests it. I've never seen my system perform poorly when there is say 20% or more of free memory. Conversely, my system always performs badly when there is little or no Free memory. You're in the no free memory category.

The doc says that the Inactive (blue) memory has been recently used -- for example you ran a program and exited that program. When you first started the program, the code was copied from disk to memory. When you exited the program, the code still was in memory, but was no longer "active". If you were to re-start the same program, the system would recognize that it is already in memory and therefore not re-read it from disk -- a good performance gain. The documentation says that this category of memory is available for other uses (similar to the Free memory). My observation is that the system will page out even if there is a lot of inactive memory available.

For our discussion we can lump "Active" and "Wired" memory together. Neither is immediately available for a new use. Although, "Active" memory can be Paged Out. Which means that when memory is needed, some of it's content is copied to disk (a process called paging). That portion of memory can now be used for other things. But eventually, the data that was paged out needs to be paged back in. A little of this paging out and back in is normal and not too painful to deal with. When it happens a lot, your system is thrashing and performance stinks.

To sum up, you need memory. Personally, I'd lookup how much my system supports and I'd max it out. If you're like me you spend many hours behind the screen every day. A zippy system will go a long way to improving your life during those hours.
 
Thanks so much man. I can't thank you enough for this.

Time between screenshots was roughly 3 - 4 hour (very rough), but from the sounds of it I will be upping the RAM over here with your good advice.

Cheers and many, many thanks.

Jonathan
 
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