[OS X TeX] (OT) Tiger and not Tigrrrr :-)?

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 27 juil. 05 à 00:05, Herbert Schulz a écrit :

> I have had a continuing battle with instabilities in Tiger.  
> Occasionally the OS would spike CPU usage to 70-90% and a user  
> process would not be able to respond to signals; this would show up  
> as a ``xxxxx not responding'' message in Activity Monitor (I never  
> needed to look in Activity Monitor and Console in any other version  
> of OS X). E.g., once in a while when I would try to put my system  
> to sleep the loginwindow process would take a very long time to  
> come up and display the dialog box.

Regarding the freeze problem only (I think I have bothered more than  
enough people on this list already with rants about Tiger's  
instabilities): I can think of three possible causes, other than bugs:

- Spotlight updating its databases in the background.

- Some network activity failing silently in the background (through  
all versions of OS X, I have experienced freezes or slowdowns with  
some network tasks in the Finder, especially with FTP -- for example  
when you click on an FTP link in Safari or Mail, and the Finder  
cannot connect to the FTP server).

- Antivirus software like ClamXav scanning directories in the  
background (see below).

But yes, I am also experiencing once a day, say, freezing  
applications with no definite causes. Usually terminate the process  
with Cmd-Alt-Esc. Happens more often on my 400 MHz/384 MB RAM/30 GB  
HD PowerMac than on my 1 GHz/1 GB RAM/60 GB HD PowerBook, which makes  
me think it must be connected with either of slow processor/low  
memory/small disk space.

> My advice is to definitely delete all traces of Virex using the un- 
> installers mentioned above if you EVER had Virex on your system.  
> Now I call OS X 10.4 Tiger rather than Tigerrrr or Tigrrrr.

With Virex incompatible with Tiger, and now than ClamXav <http:// 
www.clamxav.com/> has reached version 1 and is more compatible with  
Tiger (it doesn't fuss with the NetInfo clamav user pre-installed by  
Tiger), I am using ClamXav for antivirus scanning. It can scan  
folders/drives on demand, and includes a Sentry function for scanning  
specified directories automatically. I have set the Sentry to scan  
the Desktop (my download directory) and the various Inboxes and Junk  
mailboxes of my Mail accounts.

That said, as with any virus scanner I have tried so far, this Sentry  
function ends up invariably at some point with unexpected slowdowns  
nay crashes, and I will probably, as always, disactivate automatic  
scanning and only leave scanning on demand (for email attachments,  
typically, before forwarding messages to Windows users).

Bruno Voisin--------------------- Info ---------------------
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