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Mint in VB 4.2 - sudden slowdown after OSX 10.8.2

Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2012 2:09 am
by charrison
I posted a similar thread to the Oracle VB forum, because I'm not sure if it's a Mint or a VB problem. Here's what's going on:

Everything was fine with Mint + VB 4.2 on OSX 10.8.1 host. Seems like after updating OSX to 10.8.2, it takes about 10 minutes before the desktop becomes responsive enough to launch a Terminal and run top, which shows a python process and Xorg together eating 50% of virtual CPU.

During this 10 minutes, OSX monitors show the following:
  • VB's RAM allocation grows very slowly up to about 680M (my VM is set to 512M). I could be wrong, but I thought that the last time I watched it, it carved its entire RAM out fairly quickly.
  • CPU is 102% (one core plus a smidge; my VM is defined to use 1 CPU)
  • Constant disk I/O, mostly reads, typically ~1M/sec.
I'm unable to ascertain, during the first ten minutes, what's happening in Mint, because the UI is unresponsive.

After about 15 minutes things have started to calm down. Virtual CPU (monitored via top) is down to about 15%, and physical CPU for VB (monitored from OSX) is around 25-30%. At this point I'm not asking Mint to do anything more elaborate than run top in a Terminal.

I don't think I've seen VB draw anywhere like that much CPU with basically nothing going on in Mint. And it certainly hasn't taken 15 minutes to complete the boot process before!

The only change to my OSX system I can think of is updating from 10.8.1 to 10.8.2.

Any thoughts about this? It certainly sounds to me more like a VB problem, but the extremely slow and probably CPU-intensive boot-up shines some suspicion on Mint, too.

Very confused, and frustrated!

Thanks for any suggestions!

Chap