Update: Macports does not work on recent Mountain Lion machines

[William H. Magill]

On Sep 15, 2012, at 1:18 PM, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 10:45:48AM -0600, John Daschbach wrote:
>> I recently posted about my struggles to get macports to work on a 3
>> year old iMac with a new clean hard drive and a fresh upgrade to
>> Mountain Lion. The issue is that many subjobs called from tcl
>> hang/die. This often happens during configure, but sometimes during
>> build. Generally it is when clang is being called, but I have now
>> seen it with other related sub processes like javac.
> 
> I've seen this being reported for a number of processes, e.g., sw_vers.
> There's no much we can do about this, unless we get more information on
> one of the hanging processes. I've previously helped debugging a similar
> case and getting a trace sample showed the process was waiting for some
> IPC[1].

This may or may not be a relevant comment:

I suspect that there is a systemic issue in this  area with OS X 10.8.x

I've been beta testing (NDA now lifted) LOTRO's new Mac Client.

This client as well as the Windows client have been "converted over" to use
AWESOMIUM. Awesomium spawns 5 processes each time a new graphics zone
is encountered, destroying the previous 5.

At some point this causes the Client to "freeze" -- you get the infamous spinning beach ball.
Also, if you happen to be running Activity Monitor at the same time, it ALSO freezes.

All processes show up in Force Quit as "Process not responding." And Force quit does
not accomplish anything. (The Awesomium processes are sub processes and do not
show up individually in Force Quit.) At this time, 4 cpus on my mid-2010 iMac (I7) go "all red." 
Other processes, such as the finder, or stickies or Safari, continue to run "normally." 

However, the only way to get rid of these "frozen" processes is to reboot. At which time you get
a plethora of "console" messages (I run with nvram boot-args="-v") before the box will finally shutdown
and/or reboot. (I don't have a second system with which to capture them, and none of the console logs 
appear to capture this portion of the startup/shutdown dialogs. At least I haven't found any that match.

"Zoning" in LOTRO is a common occurrence -- entering or leaving buildings, not just geographical areas.
I.e. it happens frequently. Consequently the current MTBF for the LOTRO Clients are about 90 minutes.

If I force quit Activity Manager, from what I can tell, it typically reports DispatchQueue issues. But then I don't
have a background in reading Apple's crash reports.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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