Huge system slowdown while installing ports

[Scott Haneda]

On Jul 31, 2010, at 3:57 PM, Haravikk <me at haravikk.com> wrote:

> I've actually always experienced this with Mac Ports, and I'm afraid I'm not sure what version I first tried, but when installing ports I often find that my system really crawls along at a snail's pace. Today I've spent nearly 13 hours installing the wine-devel port, even though kernel tasks (which I assume is the relevant process) has never gone beyond 15% CPU utilisation, yet light web surfing in Safari is sluggish, jerky, and sometimes unresponsive.

If you are at 15% CPU utilization, which is next to nothing, especially on an 8 core machine, you have a bottleneck. 

There are really only three places to look. 1) CPU 2) Disk I/O 3) Memory. Since we have ruled out the CPU at 15%, that leaves memory and disk I/O.

Something is preventing the CPU's from hitting 100%. 

I would bet you have significant memory; not many people invest in Apple's higher end kits without also juicing up the memory. Assuming you have 4GB or more, I would say you are OK. Personally, with the cost of memory these days, and the number of open slots on the Mac Pro, I don't think 8GB is unrealistic, and would be my bare minimum. 

You can look in Activity Monitor or use the terminal to run 'top' to discover your memory usage. 

You are left with disk I/O. Sadly, the drives that come in most consumer/prosumer setups are physically underwhelming, or configured in a way as to be a bottleneck. 

Look at RAID, SATA 3, SAS, making sure you are using the fastest drives with the most cache you can get for your boot volume or wherever ports is going to be reading/writing. 

I would bet that an SSD would solve your issues. I hear once people go SSD on boot volume, they never consider anything else an option. 
-- 
Scott - (Sent from a mobile device)