So, I’m getting a desperately needed new iMac.
I’d been planning to get the i5, but after seeing this report I think I’ll plump for the i7. It’s on sale today for AUD$2,758.01 (don’t forget the 1c).
Posts Tagged ‘mac’
i5 or i7
Friday, November 27th, 2009Shockingly bad memory performance under Snow Leopard
Monday, October 5th, 2009I don’t know what caused it, but sometime after upgrading to Snow Leopard the performance of my laptop has dropped through the floor. It’s really bad, especially with video – this 2yo mac can’t play a youtube clip without CPU going to 100% and jerking unwatchably.
I’ve been busy so hadn’t had much chance to investigate, but one thing or another led me to suspect memory performance, so today I ran Xbench. As you’ll see, the results speak for themselves.
Memory Test 15.31
System 23.78
Allocate 116.31 427.14 Kalloc/sec
Fill 70.52 3428.64 MB/sec
Copy 9.67 199.83 MB/sec
Stream 11.28
Copy 10.55 217.93 MB/sec
Scale 10.50 216.93 MB/sec
Add 12.76 271.83 MB/sec
Triad 11.61 248.39 MB/sec
That is shockingly bad and a full order of magnitude lower than expected. There’s something seriously wrong here.
The ram is 2×2GB Kingston 667MHz. It was working fine before and continues to work, just 10x slower than it should. Any ideas?
update: i’m going to list some details to make it easier for others with similar issues to find this post by search.
ram details:
BANK 0/DIMM0:
Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0×7F98000000000000
Part Number: 0×393955353239352D3031312E4130304C4600
Serial Number: 0×160AA70D
BANK 1/DIMM1:
Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0×7F98000000000000
Part Number: 0×393955353239352D3031312E4130304C4600
Serial Number: 0×160AE80F
system details:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro2,2
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.33 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP22.00A5.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.12f5
UPDATE: removing one of the 2GB modules returns speed to normal:
Results 126.95
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.6.1 (10B504)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBookPro2,2
Drive Type FUJITSU MHW2120BH
Memory Test 126.95
System 145.21
Allocate 274.47 1.01 Malloc/sec
Fill 111.52 5422.41 MB/sec
Copy 124.24 2566.05 MB/sec
Stream 112.77
Copy 104.49 2158.22 MB/sec
Scale 106.87 2207.96 MB/sec
Add 121.81 2594.72 MB/sec
Triad 119.98 2566.73 MB/sec
This machine is actually only able to address 3GB of memory; previously it ignored the other 1GB without consequence. Seems it might not be without consequence anymore.
Sucks to only have 2GB of memory but the system is now so much more responsive it’s actually a huge win. I’ll continue like this until further information emerges.
What’s holding open that port on OSX
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Since I always, ALWAYS forget this, here’s the command to find the process which is holding open, say, port 1900 on osx:
$ lsof -i -P | grep 1900 uTorrent 50937 sho 13u IPv4 0xaf49b10 0t0 UDP 10.1.1.8:1900
Fucking uTorrent, why the hell is it sitting on 1900? That’s the SSDP/UPnP server-side port, ie. the router should be listening on 1900. Unless it’s planning on advertising SSDP services it can provide, it doesn’t need that port. Wonder what it’s doing.
Oh btw it only shows your processes, sudo if you wanna see ‘em all.
Snow Leopard only has Ruby 1.8.7
Monday, June 22nd, 2009A bit of a disappointment – I’d been hoping they’d go with 1.9.1.
Back to the Future with Apple’s new pricing
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009Excited about the new Mac Pro ‘09? You will be if you live in Australia, where Apple offers the thrilling possibility of paying almost $6,000 for the base 8-core model:
But that’s the lowest speed CPU option, with two 2.26GHz CPUs. How about if we want the faster option, with 2.93GHz processors? Let’s configure that:
Over $10,000 dollars. No extra RAM, HD or indeed anything else – this is the emptiest box you can buy with the high-speed CPUs. And in fact a prudent buyer would expect it to be about $11,000 once he upgraded to the sweetest nearby spot, getting rid of the useless 1GB DIMMs which come with the “base” model, and adding a couple of other necessary items best factory installed, like a wireless card.
How many people do you know who spend $11k, or indeed even $6k, on a computer, in 2009?
couchdb: switching to experimental branch
Friday, October 12th, 2007Current CouchDB development is progressing in an experimental branch named “interface-changes”, and it’s not in trunk yet. As the name implies, the interface is changing and it’s very useful.
To switch your svn checkout to this branch, do this:
svn sw http://couchdb.googlecode.com/svn/branches/interfacechanges/ ./bootstrap && ./configure --prefix=/opt/local && make clean && make && sudo make install
You can then have a look at the “documentation” to see some of the new changes.
While still alpha, it’s still a very interesting project. The prospect of getting something like Map/Reduce capability natively in a database is almost too exciting for words, if you’re a data nerd like me. Well, figuratively speaking, Map’s there, but Reduce isn’t yet – still, it’s great to get your hands on what seems sure to become a Big Thing so early. Oh, and in case you were wondering, COUCH stands for “Cluster of Unreliable Commodity Hardware”.
Imagine GFS and Map/Reduce, baked into a single databse, with JSON in/out, pluggable query language, and native REST .. what’s not to love?
Laika’s ThingFish is a Ruby-based competitor. You might think I’d be more interested in that, since it’s in my favourite language! Not so. The very thought of a Database programmed in Ruby actually gives me an instant waking nightmare along the lines of running through treacle, gulliver in lilliputia, 80286SXs with 12MB of RAM, etc. And using mongrel server for a database!
UPDATE: it’s been merged to trunk, so just forget that interface-changes stuff.
Installing CouchDB on MacOSX
Monday, October 8th, 2007If you, like me, have been keeping an eye on the extremely interesting CouchDB Project then maybe you’ve thought about playing around with it a bit on your Mac. This turns out to be very simple.
I assume you have macports w/ subversion (and XCode, of course) installed already. Most of this comes straight from the Readme but I hate reading those, I just want someone to write what I have to do – maybe you do too, so here you are!
UPDATE: 11th October
Reinstalling after noticing 60 commits in 3 days .. now that’s active development.