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Topping Sierra

Feeling a bit rough around the edges?


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ONE INFINITE (Rixstep) — Feeling a bit rough around the edges? Too much partying? Your brand spanking new macOS 10.12 Sierra acting like you feel? Something like this?

$ top
Processes: 208 total, 4 running, 204 sleeping, 732 threads 20:14:15
Load Avg: 3.12, 1.87, 0.80  CPU usage: 21.33% user, 7.94% sys, 70.71% idle
SharedLibs: 197M resident, 45M data, 24M linkedit.
MemRegions: 14966 total, 668M resident, 118M private, 244M shared.
PhysMem: 2245M used (922M wired), 1848M unused.
VM: 563G vsize, 612M framework vsize, 0(0) swapins, 0(0) swapouts.
Networks: packets: 1291/908K in, 1277/332K out.
Disks: 31580/1525M read, 5092/469M written.

That's not too bad, right? This of course off a fresh cold boot, after a peremptory /sbin/fsck -fy of course.

No, that is not OK. Not even close. This from an older version of venerable OS X/macOS.

$ top
Processes: 68 total, 2 running, 3 stuck, 63 sleeping, 376 threads 18:12:45
Load Avg: 0.44, 0.38, 0.40  CPU usage: 2.14% user, 2.85% sys, 95.0% idle
SharedLibs: 740K resident, 0B data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 23953 total, 1570M resident, 37M private, 705M shared.
PhysMem: 895M wired, 2104M active, 1060M inactive, 4059M used, 34M free.
VM: 174G vsize, 1091M framework vsize, 384586(0) pageins, 154629(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 22484588/29G in, 9333152/800M out.
Disks: 458128/7452M read, 5505341/71G written.

There are a lot of interesting stats there. Most interesting, say the Linux gurus, are the load averages, which should always be under 1.00.

  • Where and how and why did we get an additional 140 processes? Running on an idling machine?
  • How can a system burn over 20% user CPU on a system that's just booted and still isn't doing anything?
  • The infamous 'helpd' is back, but it was killt before the power down. Before that, user CPU was over 30%.
  • Shared libs on the older system consumed 740 KB in resident memory; now they take 197 MB? 266 times as much?
  • Almost twice as many execution threads? Doing what exactly?

A machine that's idling. Off a fresh cold boot. After passing the fsck test in SUM. No processes started save one. And it's still consuming so much CPU. And it would potentially would consume half again as much.

10.12 is feeling a bit rough around the edges.

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