Your best friend for file transfer.

Fetch application logoFetch

Fetch interfering with other applications? (4 posts)

This is an archived topic. The information in it is likely to be out-of-date and no longer applicable to current versions of Fetch.
  • Started 20 years ago by davidmorr
  • Latest reply 20 years ago from Jim Matthews
  • davidmorr Member

    I have been downloading large files to my Mac and have noticed some impacts on other applications. The files are large enough to take an hour or more.

    I am getting transfer rates of around 27 kbytes per second. Because of this, I expect slow response from anything that uses the network connecton.

    However, the application I am having most problem with is Eudora 6.0.2, when it should not be accessing the network.

    For example, if I have a message window open, clicking on the scroll bar to scroll down does nothing for a second or two, then the spinning pizza appears for several seconds, then the window eventually scrolls.

    The same thing happens with opening a message or a mailbox, or almost any other operation.

    Now I suspect that this is an issue for Eudora really, except that I have noticed slowdowns for other applications, but not as severe as this.

    What is odd is that the CPU usage is well below 50% when this happens, so it would not seem to be lack of processor.

    The file being downloaded is also being written to a different disk to where the Eudora files are, so contention for the disk would seem to be unlikely.

    I wondered whether there could be something that Fetch is doing?

    Mac G4/450DP, OSX 10.3.2, ADSL connection 256/64, Fetch 4.0.3

    David

    Posted 20 years ago #

  • Jim Matthews Administrator

    Your description of what happens when you try to scroll in Eudora sounds like paging -- that's when the OS has put some of the contents of memory onto the hard disk, and you have to wait while they are retrieved. It can be difficult to tell why paging happens, and I would not expect a Fetch transfer to have this effect -- Fetch does not use much memory.

    I believe there are a number of programs available to monitor memory use on OS X. You can type "top" in the Terminal application to get a lot of performance statistics, including how many times the OS has had to retrieve memory from disk (pageins).

    Thanks,

    Jim Matthews
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 20 years ago #

  • davidmorr Member

    Originally posted by JimMatthews:

    Your description of what happens when you try to scroll in Eudora sounds like paging -- that's when the OS has put some of the contents of memory onto the hard disk, and you have to wait while they are retrieved. It can be difficult to tell why paging happens, and I would not expect a Fetch transfer to have this effect -- Fetch does not use much memory.

    Thanks for the tip. top shows there to be around 80MB of free memory, along with 340MB of inactive memory. Neither the pageins or pageouts figures change when I observe the behaviour in Eudora. This would perhaps make a paging problem unlikely.

    What I am seeing is that Fetch is using around 50% of the CPU time, which I would have though was a bit excessive, given that it is downloading a binary file that presumably does not need much processing?

    (The download is from a Panther system and is an AIFF file. Fetch reports it to be binary data.)

    David

    Posted 20 years ago #

  • Jim Matthews Administrator

    That CPU usage seems very excessive, but even so it shouldn't cause another application to freeze. I confess that I do not have an explanation for the behavior you are seeing. At the same time, we are working to make Fetch use the CPU more efficiently in future releases.

    Thanks,

    Jim Matthews
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 20 years ago #

Topic closed

This topic has been closed.