Re: OS X

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From: Nicholas Clark
Subject: Re: OS X
Date: 10:40 on 18 May 2004
On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 10:14:15AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> This is an "idle" machine:
> 
> Load Avg:  1.19, 1.26, 1.16     CPU usage:  22.6% user, 77.4% sys, 0.0% idle
> 
> W.T.F? It's spinning the hard disk like crazy, yet I'm not doing anything.
> The only way to get it out of this mess is to reboot. This hateful state
> appears to be related to the spontaneous logout on screen unlock bug
> (which I wasn't going to hate because it didn't kill my local screen session)

Aha. I have found the cause of the hate.

Firstly my diagnosis of the source of the noise was wrong - it was the fan
doing UK government impressions. Implication, 100% CPU, rather than
the VM system going swaptastic.

And indeed it is related to the spontaneous logout hate, and the screen
session still running. The hateful spontaneous logout causes the X server to
quit. This kills the xemacs X window, leaving the main xemacs running in
the screen session. Only it seems that hateful xemacs goes into an infinite
spin if you kill its connection to the X server unexpectedly. (Found this
with xemacs on Linux too). [And why am I running xemacs - because emacs
hatefully defaults Meta G to "set face", and it's a prefix key so I've not
figured out how to kill kill kill that and replace it with something useful - 
goto line. Dear hateful RMS, how many times a day do I need to set the face?
And how many times do I need to go to a line? Style over substance. Hateful]

So, hateful xemacs is doing this:

   682 xemacs-21.4.9 CALL  select(0x7,0xbfffe530,0xbfffe5b0,0xbfffe630,0xbfffe51
8)
   682 xemacs-21.4.9 RET   select 1
   682 xemacs-21.4.9 CALL  select(0x7,0xbfffe530,0xbfffe5b0,0xbfffe630,0xbfffe51
8)
   682 xemacs-21.4.9 RET   select 1

as fast as it possibly can, so in a minute of so of tracing it I see:

 kdump  | grep RET | grep -c select
4237063


and I have to kill kill kill it.

And no I'm not using vi instead of x?emacs, because I hates it more.

Nicholas Clark
There's stuff above here

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