OT probably, help please

[James Linder]

> On 21 Jan 2015, at 2:38 pm, William H. Magill <magill at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 20, 2015, at 10:28 PM, James Linder <jam at tigger.ws> wrote:
>> 
>> G’day
>> The other day I reported that gnuplot had suddenly stopped working with term x11 but worked with term aqua.
>> Maybe it was just slow !
>> I have an issue where the system has (suddenly) become very slow …
>> 
>> iMac 27 top:cpu free 99 ish %
>> system-monitor also shows cpu cores at 0% busy
>> men free 8G
>> df 50 ish %
>> yosemite
>> 
>> change mail from one entry to another: wheel turns for 10-20 seconds then all is normal including change topic (repeat previous selection).
>> firefox:youtube watch a clip, midway stops playing and wheel turns for 5-10 seconds before resuming
>> 
>> Thinking this may be a DNS issue I ran wireshark. wiresharks stops while wheel is turning!
>> 
>> system-monitor shows no (just got the wheel for 5 secs, no response to usb-keyboard nothing interesting on system-monitor) sys-monitor (pause again!) ticks every 5 secs even during wheel turning.
>> 
>> This seems unrelated to macports. Time machine is on an external USB disk and scheduled to run now (another pause checks:TM disk definitly NOT busy)
>> 
>> So before I nuke this install, any ideas gratefully acceped
>> James 
>> _______________________________________________
> 
> Sounds like issues with Anti-malware virus programs. 
> The ones that insert themselves into your tcp/ip data stream to examine all of your traffic so that you don't' download "bad stuff."
> 
> I had to shut off thtat processing in Sophos because it had gotten so bad (i.e. taking FOREVER to load any program that talked to the internet.)
> 
> That was a "sudden" change in how Sophos was working. At first I thought it was  simply because I had turned on the iCloud drive (which does impact things).
> But after a lot of trial and no-luck turned off the option in Sophos.
> 
> Long ago I had tried Avast! and discovered that it's anti-malware was simply horrible in what it did to a Mac.

BSD and linux are pretty much of a muchness here. There are no malware or virus’ for either so I don’t do anti-virus, hence it’s not that. Thanks too to Jeremy it does not look like appnap stuff. (but it could be)

The whole virus scenario is messy. It has been demonstrated as proof of concept. Apple’s forray into Konqueror oops I mean Safari is an example of how to do it wrong. You basically don’t need to protect your mac, but someone may find a weak spot. Will anti-virus save you? $1,000,000 question.

Meanwhile I s-s-st-stu-stutter along debating nuking this whole install …
James