Re: beachball

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: beachball
Date: 12:51 on 26 Apr 2005
> I hate that thing too.  These days there is no reason to lock the
> entire computer while you're opening one application.

Say what?

I routinely switch to the terminal and do stuff there while applications
are bobbing in the dock loading, or are otherwise beachball-happy.

If you can't do that, something else is wrong. I've had one of the
XServes at work do that to me a lot, when it was memory-starved and
paging its guts out. But I've never had it happen just because one
application was busy, hung, or dead.

> I open the top and the display instantly shows the login prompt.  But
> can I type in my password?  No, I have to wait for the damn beachball
> to stop spinning.  It takes at least half a minute.  And why?  Surely
> graphics must be more complex than accepting keyboard input.

My off-the-top-of-my-head guess is LoginWindow is blocked on disk I/O
and your disk is still spinning up.

Insert hate about Adobe not putting server-side UI scripting into Display
Postscript, so NeXT couldn't use that to implement UI elements like Sun did
with NeWS. Because if they had, then Apple would have pretty much had to
duplicate that in OS X, and they'd be able to move some of that to the GPU
in Quartz Extreme. We'd have OpenGL Postscript instead of Dashboard.

I hate missed opportunities like that.

There's stuff above here

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