OSX Mavericks Quick Review

The one line summary:

You probably won't notice anything that's worse, and you probably WILL notice a few things are a little better... and a couple things that are a LOT better.

Those couple things are the finder (tabbed finder FTW), the activity monitor (WAY more useful now), much better power management (a little to a LOT longer battery life, and less fan time at lower speeds; though they still don't allow granular control over sleep and hibernation. I use SleepLess for that), the slightly less irritating notifications; and the slightly to considerably lower cpu, memory, and power usage, in high overhead situations (when you've got lots of stuff open and idle in the background).

It also seems to boot a tiny bit quicker, and the virtual memory access patterns seem a bit better (my disk I/O indicators aren't flashing as much in low-medium workload situations). Scratch that... after a few hours, my virtual memory utilization is WAY better, as is my overall memory utilization and management.

Oh and multi-monitor setups are WAY better and more useful now, particularly if you're using an HDTV as a monitor.

I'm an android user, so I sync my contacts with google not iCloud (and my notes with evernote, and my files with g-drive and dropbox, and my passwords and bookmarks with another multi-platform independent service etc... etc...); and I exclusively use webmail and web calendars, so the changes there don't really impact me at all, and I can't give my opinion thereof.

I use Chrome and Firefox not Safari... if Google would make a native OSX 64 bit Chrome that would support appnap and sleeping idle plugins and tabs... that would be really nice. Until then... meh.

Also, iWork for free with new Macs.. cool I guess... I don't use it, again, can't give my opinion

Oh one bad thing... 

On my wife's mid 2010 13" MBP the install was so slow, with so little feedback (it stayed at "about 7 minutes remaining" for over 20 minutes), that I thought it had frozen, and I restarted it. It turns out it was just in the middle of uncompressing a REALLY large file, and it took like 15 minutes to do so.

I figured it out because my early 2011 top end 15" MBP uncompressed the file in like 5 minutes and then moved on. So I started the install over on the 13" and watched the install log. I let it keep running and eventually it finished the install just fine.

Actually two things...

Downloading it sucked. It took 2 days to download 5 gigs, and I had to restart the download multiple times. Mac Appstore downloads in general are slow and glitchy, especially for apps over a few hundred megs.

Oh and a feature request... 

Apple, next time include a free program... in fact make it an option in the installer... to create an installation USB drive or somesuch?

I have no problem donwloading a third party app (DiskMaker X works great), using a commandline hack, or extracting the install image from the app and imaging it onto a USB drive... but I'm a technology professional. Most people don't know how to do it, and they don't want to have to download 5 gigs for every computer they own, or when their computer dies have to download the OS again from the recovery console (allowing a reload from disk there would be nice too).

Hmm... yeah... there's your problem right there...

So, my MacBook Pro has been acting a bit wonky lately... and I'm pretty sure I know why.

A few weeks ago, I started getting disk corruption, that couldn't be handled with the normal disk utilities; and required me to get a clean backup on an external drive, wipe and reformat the internal drive, and restore...

Well, I kept getting the corruption problems after a few hours or a few days... and they kept getting worse.

Finally, I ended up rebuilding the thing 5 times in two day; and 3 times in one night (this was the night before my big compliance webinar. I didn't sleep at all the day before or that night, and ended up working all night and all morning before the webinar to try to get sorted).

This was basically two weeks of escalating pain, but until the last night the issues were intermittent with variable recurrence, so I couldn't get enough diagnostic info to nail it down.

With the 3 in on night episode, I was finally able to see the problem occuring...

And it's something I have NEVER seen... never even heard of...

What was happening on the HDD was lots of tiny single bit/single block/single write i/o errors. Ok, that happens... but why? It was a less than 90 day old relatively high end SSD (my last SSD went bad this past summer).

So I looked deeper at the errors, and noted that not all of them were from the hard drive...

Some of them were from the DVD drive...

Which had a scratched up DVD-R in it...

I pulled out the bad DVD-R and... holy crap, no more I/O errors.

What was happening, was that the particular damage on the DVD drive, was causing the I/O controller to constantly attempt to re-read the drive, and fail... hundreds of times a second. Instead of just limiting out though, it was causing enough latency in the SSD, that it was getting I/O errors as well...

Thing is... I didn't notice, because the DVD drive wasn't constantly spinning up... just a couple times an hour maybe? Which could have been explained by finder doing crap.

I've never seen that before... never even heard of that before, in a desktop or laptop (it's something that can happen with large high volume high transaction count servers, if they don't have sufficient spindles or cache, and their i/o controllers don't handle the exceptions properly).

Anyway... I got that resolved, and got my MBP functional...

But, ever since the last rebuild (after I figured out the problems), it's been a bit wonky. The finder doing some weird things etc...

I've run all the normal diagnostics, and at this point I'm pretty sure that to get sorted, I'm going to need to do another clean beackup, but instead of just restoring, I need to do a clean install, then migrate my apps and data.

It's a PITA, so I'm putting it off until I can't put it off anymore...

Meantime, I'm living with assorted wonkiness.

One of the items of said assortment; I hadn't really noticed it until a couple days ago, but I couldn't empty my trash.

This happens on OSX sometimes, it's not really a big deal. Usually it's a file that is locked somewhere and it can't be forced to let go because of a zombie process, or a bad pointer somewhere etc...

It's generally easy to fix. You just go into the trash directory from the command line, and force delete everything.

So, I went in, as root, and did a listing of my .Trash.

And it took a while... a LOOONG while... many many many screens of data flashing by my screen...

24 MILLION ITEMS... for a total of 243.8 gigabytes.

Well... there's yer problem right there...

It seems that the detritus of the multiple rebuilds... including several complete copies of my hard drive... ended up getting stuck in the trash for some reason; and couldn't empty out.

So, I started the force delete and went on to other things in other windows... after about 20 minutes I came back... and my command prompt hadn't come back...

I figured it had frozen up, or otherwise wasn't working; so I cancelled the job. Ran the listing again...

Nope... it had been working... It had deleted 9 million of the items, there were still 15 million left.

So I started the job back up again and went away for 20 more minutes... went back... still working...

As I was about to switch windows away it finally finished.

It took 40 minutes to delete the crap from the command line, no wonder I couldn't empty or open my trash in finder...

Mac users beware

The Mac OSX 10.6.6 update Apple released yesterday to support the new Mac app store, may kill your mac... or at least your hard drives file system.

Apparently this has happened to at least a few hundred folks... probably a lot more... given how many people are popping up in forums.

What's happening, is your catalog is being corrupted somehow, during the install and reboot process; and it can't be recovered.

So far, no particular common elements have been identified to isolate what's causing it in the relatively small number of users who have had the problem; except that it seems primarily to be happening to people who have vmware, virtualbox, or parallels installed... but that's at least 1/2 of all of Mac users these days, and there's no clear indication if it's causative or not.

Also it seems to be happening more to people with SSD's but not exclusively.

If you've installed the patch already, don't reboot. Make a carbon copy of your drive, just in case; THEN reboot. If your drive is hosed, you can fix it.

And yes, of course, you should have done a backup before you updated... Yeah... how many actually do that for their laptops?

If it's already too late for you, there is a solution. Grab an external drive, and a boot disk (they can be one and the same if you've got two partitions on the drive and dont mind killing one of them), and you should be able to mount the trashed drive read only, and then carbon copy it to a partition on the external drive.

Best of luck.