Re: XGrid Question

macsucks3737@xxxxxxxxx wrote: 
So, you are lecturing me about the performance of a product that you do
not even own.


That is correct. It doesn't take lengthy use to determine the relative
performance of a product.




Not really. The faster processor would alleviate my current speed
concerns,

Why? That 1.25ghz G4 is more than sufficient for anything you claim to do.


Then... Why is it so slow?
I don't know--the system you have should be much faster than the performance you claim. It's certainly not because of the processor.



and the faster hard drive means that it doesn't matter so
much if it has to swap to the paging file once in awhile.


I think your viewing memory management from a Windows standpoint.


Plus, it will
likely be able to run Mac OS within a few months.


Not legally. If you want to illegally run an operating system on
hardware it has no support for, be my guest.



Once I purchase my copy of "OSX 10.5 x86" I will install it anywhere I
choose.
If they make use of TPM, then I wish you luck in your endeavor. You'll need it.

Considering that Apple's support is not very good to begin with
I will hardly be missing out.
If you think it's bad on supported hardware, wait till you try it on hardware that Apple provides no drivers for.




what app, what are you doing when this happens? 


Firefox, Word, Excel, Photoshop, inDesign, Dreamweaver -- pretty much
everything I use.


This is very unusual.





to your main question, no. xgrid only works with apps specifically coded
to use it



Thanks. Any way to find a list of these apps? Or is there anything
similar to XGrid that can work with other programs?


No. Clustering is for large computational tasks. It's not going to work
for things like Photoshop or Firefox.

Besides, your problem has nothing to do with processor performance. A
1.25ghz Mac mini would do everything you have mentioned just fine, or
should anyway.


And yet, it doesn't. 

Which is surprising. Almost as if your trolling, in fact. It makes me
wonder if this, if it actually happened, is really a user error.


Well, okay. What user errors could lead to the symptoms I described? 

I'm not sure, I'd have to see the system in question. But your
experience is not typical, and extends into multiple machines
administered by yourself. That suggests user error, or user inexperience.


Maybe you could list some typical errors that users make? 

Not leaving their boxes up (thus preventing the maintanence scripts from
running), leaving applications open despite closing all windows, running
excessively intensive programs in the background unwittingly, or simply
misdiagnosing problems.


I'll be the
first to admit that I am inexperienced when it comes to Macs. But at
the same time, I don't exactly go out of my way to mess with the
terminal or any system configuration utilities.



I suppose that worst case scenario, I could use something like VNC and
just run a couple of apps on each box -- although at that point I might
as well just be logging into my PCs instead.


Or perhaps you should find out why the Mac minis are performing so far
below normal.



Okay, how do I go about doing that? Any kind of software to optimize OS
X or something like that?


No, you list specific instances where it is slow, and look for
commonalities between them. Your log files and System Monitor would be
of great help (OS X keeps meticulous logs, when compared with something
as sloppy as XP).



Here are some cases where I see long delays:

Printing, print previewing, 

This is very strange.

 editing formulas in Excel,
That isn't unusual. Office on Mac is very often sluggish.



No wonder most offices do not use them.


drawing graphs
in Microsoft Graph,


See above.


switching between multiple Firefox tabs,

What's being displayed on the pages? 


It usually tends to happen with slightly more complicated web pages,
especially if they are image-intensive or run some sort of scripting. A
bunch of static HTML pages are usually alright. Still, it doesn't
happen with Firefox on XP.
Stop comparing it to XP righ tnow--the behavior you report is extremely unusual, and this exercise is mainly to help you troubleshoot the problem (and I assure you, there is an abnormality on those boxes).



adding
images to Word/Pages documents,

Word documents, or Pages documents? It does matter. 


It happens in both programs, though Pages is probably a bit worse in
this regard.


almost anything in Dreamweaver, 

I don't use Dreamweaver.


browsing network drives in the finder, (the whole finder will start
freezing up, it isn't just network lag)

Yes, it is network lag. That's one of the Finder's problems. 


Why would network lag affect finder windows that are browsing local
volumes?
You say your browsing network drives; the Finder can (and does) 'lock up' with network lag.

The worst is when you set it to copy anything off of the
network, if the copy is interrupted the entire finder will often crash
and not be able to relaunch.

*That* is unusual.




using Expose/Dashboard if
multiple windows are open, etc.


My (much weaker) iBook G4 handles Expose well with up to a dozen
windows, routinely. No slowdown whatsoever.



At what resolution? Expose is snappy for me too if I set my monitor to
800x600.

1024x768--native res of the display.



Adobe CS is always slow too, but this I
can understand being these are resource-intensive applications.

Where would I find these log files that you mention?

/var/log is a good place to start. 


I cannot find any such directory, nor can spotlight. Is it marked as
invisible or something?

Yes, Finder won't display it. Fire up Terminal and type 'cd /var/log'
.

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