[OS X TeX] Two pdftex in Activity Monitor

[Alain Schremmer]

On , at 2016 Jul 25,6:26 AM, chris wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Jul 2016 22:35:53 -0400, Alain Schremmer wrote:
>> I am using TexShop 2.47 with TeXLive 2013 under 10.6.8. Everything 
>> works swimmingly except that, occasionally, compilation is a bit 
>> slow.  Since I am slow myself, that is fine except that the mac just 
>> crashed.
> 
> Macs usually don't just crash without a reason.
> What exactly did happen, complete freeze, reboot, kernel panic screen?

It was rather fascinating: it shut down all by itself after suddenly showing a screen with Microsoft something just at the end of a compilation.

> Which model are you using?

Macmini3.1
Intel Core 2 Duo

> What does the system.log file (/var/log/system.log) say at the time of 
> crash.

No idea where they can be found.

>> Nothing got lost but I got curious and started Activity 
>> Monitor to see if I could not disable a few competing and unnecessary 
>> applications.
> 
> What do you mean by disable. Did you just quit unused applications?

Yes but quitting Google Drive---which I am not really using for the time being---felt more like a fight. :-))

> Normally this should not make a difference unless you are running very 
> low on RAM. Check this in Activity Monitor "System Memory" pane. "Swap 
> used" is the most interesting.

I will do that tonight when I resume working on the magnum opus.
> 
>> I did so and it seemed to have made compilation a bit 
>> faster. But then I noticed that Activity Monitor lists two pdftex so 
>> I watched them as I was working.
> 
> Sorry don't know about the internals of pdftex.
> 
> Greetings, chris

Thanks
--schremmer