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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Nice-ing Apps

BaristaCMH - Apr 19, 2006 - 6:29 pm

Hello-

I am attempting to use iMovie to create a 30 min video of Betty Page pictures for the opening of the movie. (I work for a movie theater)

I am having issues with the program that seem to be a processor issue. I have no other apps open and it is still getting rather cluncky.

My question: Can I use a 'nice' command in terminal to devote more processor to this app? I tried to encode a similar movie and it took 900mins to export the video.

Any help would be appreciated!

-B-

P.S.- I am using a Macbook Pro, 1.83 Ghz

ericl - Apr 19, 2006 - 7:44 pm

Haven't looked at 'nice' in eons; thanks.

This O/S does have the nice command, so sure you could.

I would start by using the 'iostat' command to see where your bottleneck(s) are. If CPU % idle is a small number, then it's CPU.

If vm_stat shows lot's og paging/ swapping, then it's memory

I would suspect that disk & memory will become issues before CPU usage/scheduling is an issue

Have fun, Eric

BaristaCMH - Apr 19, 2006 - 7:52 pm

Well, I cannot tell what is happening, so I have pasted what comes back from the commands I gave....

" iostat
disk1 disk0 cpu
KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us sy id
5.10 1 0.00 24.34 25 0.60 22 5 73
Macintosh-3:~ kward$ vm_stat
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 19626.
Pages active: 31090.
Pages inactive: 58090.
Pages wired down: 21498.
"Translation faults": 13662600.
Pages copy-on-write: 70519.
Pages zero filled: 12442799.
Pages reactivated: 240301.
Pageins: 79120.
Pageouts: 94135.
Object cache: 44357 hits of 61409 lookups (72% hit rate)"

So, what does it look like to you?

ericl - Apr 20, 2006 - 10:59 am

The way these commands work is that they report statistics per "sample interval". Since you did not give a sample interval, you got one sample averaged since you last booted your system.

Do this:

(1) Start generating your load (use iMovie in a manner that causes the "problem statement"; clunky performance)

(2) In your terminal window say:

#iostat -w 5 -c 5

This will run an iostat every 5 seconds 5 times.

Go ahead & send me the output.

Depending on what iostat looks like, we will or will not run some vm_stat

Thanks, Eric

BaristaCMH - Apr 20, 2006 - 11:41 am

OK. Here is the output from that last command. I have just restarted my computer in the last half hour, if that makes any difference. I will send another output in an hour or so after puting it through its paces!


disk0 cpu
KB/t tps MB/s us sy id
24.35 66 1.57 18 5 77
62.78 5 0.28 44 2 54
70.25 17 1.19 32 3 66
44.16 41 1.77 51 4 45
20.09 12 0.24 43 8 49

ericl - Apr 20, 2006 - 4:16 pm

Whatever you were doing utilized about 50% of your CPU.

Disk utilization was low