Disk journaling or NO disk journaling (Mac OS Extended format volumes)...

[Palomine]

Ever since upgrading to 10.5, I've been noticing what seems like a lot more disk activity for no discernible reason. Even with every single app closed (nothing other than Finder running) I sometimes hear the hard disks busy at work... and the CPU load for the Finder at those times varies from about 25 to as much as 40%. This didn't seem to be so noticeable under 10.3 (my prior version of the OS) but now, it seems a bit much. When the drives occasionally go relatively quiet, the % of CPU the Finder is using drops to <5%... and the whole system feels a bit faster. AFAICT, nothing I'm actively doing makes the drives start or stop yapping... it seems to be something that the OS is dealing with, not me.

The only thing I can ?THINK? of (at the moment/I'm open to other suggestions) is that the I/O and CPU load are due to ongoing journaling of the (3) 500 gig hard drive volumes on the machine. I know journaling is supposed to make recovering from a crash easier/better, but it's been literally YEARS since I've had a full system crash of that sort... and if it's journaling that's responsible for this ongoing burden, I'd like to try turning it off.

So, my questions:

Can I deactivate journaling for one or all drives? In Disk Utility I see there's a button to *enable* journaling (though it's greyed out) but I don't see a button (or toggle) to turn journaling off. Is there another way to turn it off/disable it on a volume that's currently listed as 'journaled' in Disk Utility? Or once the choice has been made, are you stuck with it until the next time the disk is formatted?

Also, what (aside from the better recovery from crashes thing) is the advantage of journaling a volume? Does it make filename searches faster or something like that too? Is it a must-have thing, or something that can be lived without?

Finally, if it's NOT possible to disable journaling on a disk once it's been started/assigned, I *assume* that I can just install another disk, format it as Mac OS Extended (WITHOUT journaling) and then copy all the stuff from a journaled disk to the non-journaled disk, right? Then I can just remove the journaled disk or erase/reformat it as a non-journaled disk.

TIA for any feedback.

The cap below shows a very dramatic 61% CPU load by the Finder, with almost nothing else (separate) running. An unusually high spike, but illustrative.

[Q_BE]

I'm interested to see what is said about this, because I now backup my files (thanks to an aforementioned crash of my own), and I'd like to see if I can squeeze more performance out of my 3-year-old Mac. I'm running Leopard, 10.6, if I am not mistaken. I'm seriously thinking about the upgrade to Snow Leopard...I'd heard it's only $30 because it contains performance enhancements, not structural changes to the OS.

Q-"TIA like Palomine said"-BE

[Palomine]

I'm interested to see what is said about this, because I now backup my files (thanks to an aforementioned crash of my own), and I'd like to see if I can squeeze more performance out of my 3-year-old Mac. I'm running Leopard, 10.6, if I am not mistaken. I'm seriously thinking about the upgrade to Snow Leopard...I'd heard it's only $30 because it contains performance enhancements, not structural changes to the OS.

Q-"TIA like Palomine said"-BE

Though I'm no fan of the 'cat' designations, I believe Leopard is 10.5 and it's Snow Leopard that's 10.6. Though the upgrade is only $29., I think there's more than just performance enhancements in the 10.6 OS: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC223Z/A?fnode=MTY1NDAzOA&mco=MTA4MjgwNDE ...it requires an Intel CPU btw and is the very first Mac OSX version to do so.

As my Mac is circa 2003 (and running OSX 10.5.eight) you can imagine my interest in sparing the CPU any unnecessary labor.

Added later: some basics on journaling here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2355 but I'm still not sure if I can STOP journaling a disk volume once started, and whether it's a good idea... it does suggest that journaling can impact performance, so perhaps it's worth a try. However, even with the Option key depressed to activate 'disable journaling' in the file menu (necessary from 10.4 on) I'm unable to do so on any of my drives. If it were necessary to unmount them first, I assume the article would say so. Any suggestions appreciated.

[SwitcherX]

I'm almost 100% positive that if you want to get rid of journiling, you have to reformat the drive.

Pal replies: that's what I've been suspecting, even though the Apple dox I linked to below seem to explicitly indicate that (using the Option key to expand the menus... which is a little non-intuitive IMO) you CAN toggle the journaling on and OFF in Disk Utility. However, on my machine (OSX 10.5.eight) in Disk Utility (11.1), File menu/enable journaling is greyed out and when I press Option, the menu changes but the greyed out journaling choice DOESN'T change to disable journaling as the dox suggest.

It's not the end of the world: I backup by simply dragging the contents of one drive to another, so next time I make a backup, I could slip in an empty one, format it w/o journaling and then use it as my drag-to/target/backup destination. However, from what I gather, journaling is simply the system keeping a chronological list of every single file transaction, so that it can quickly recreate whatever might have been lost during a sudden power outage, etc... Thus, it would seem to make sense that journaling COULD simply be turned off, as you'd just be telling the system to stop list-making.

So odd that the Apple document differs from how Disk Utility seems to work for me. If you have it open and press Option while looking at the File menu, does YOUR enable journaling change to become disable journaling?

Just curious. Thanks!

[Cheviot]

No no no... Journalling good. Journalling keeps track of disk transactions on the fly to help prevent disk corruption due to unexpected shutdowns or crashes.

What you're seeing is an effect of Spotlight indexing. Disabling that will slow down searches, but rid of the lag you're seeing.

Pal sputters: who from the what now?

I never (knowingly) use Spotlight: after two and a half decades with Mac OS, I'm forever in the Command-F habit (regular Finder find). If Spotlight is constantly indexing every single file on all my (internal/connected) drives (containing well over 2 million files the last time I did a big backup, and stuff gets changed daily) then I'd like to turn it off since A) I don't use it and B) it seems to (intermittently) cost a bunch of extra CPU cycles that I can't really spare.

I just opened Spotlight preferences (inside System Prefs) and I don't see anything that lets you turn off (or on) indexing... can I disable it someplace else? Spotlight's own help tool is mum, probably due to self-interest.

TIA!


gonZo yammers: You can use the Privacy tab in System Preferences > Spotlight to omit volumes from Spotlight searches... since it's regarded as a privacy issue, it probably omits them from ongoing indexing, too...

[Lightfoot]

Other thoughts:

Do you use Time Machine?  When it's backing up you would see a spike in processor and disk usage.

(Like Linux) doesn't MacOS X automatically defragment files smaller than 20 MBs?  I'm not sure if they actually run a defragmentation program in the background, but I have an old Xubuntu 600 mhz computer that'll start making a lot of processor and disk noise once a day or so.

Pal replies: no, Time Machine is another thing I never use... so it's probably not that. I thought that volume journaling was a good suspect, especially given the note about it impacting performance (in the Apple link) but I'm open to the idea of it being Spotlight as well.

Gonzo, there's nothing at all in Spotlight's Privacy preference tab... you think I should ADD all three hard drives?

Yeah, if you want Spotlight to stop messing with them. - g

[Chestnuts]

I also believe it's indexing that's slowing things down. When I first got a G4 some years ago, in setting it up it wanted to index everything so searches would be faster. I decided to not let it do that. No hard drive churning. Searches on that G4 don't work as well as they should, but if one organizes their files well, it's not a problem.

Somewhere on the internet I've read of some others who noticed increased HD activity after upgrading OSX software.


From anything I remember reading about the subject of journaling, iz a good thang.


Hard drives chugging can be symptoms of other things also, none of them good.

[Palomine]

OK, per g and C, I've dragged all three hard drives into the second (privacy) tab of System/Spotlight preferences. I'll keep an eye (and ear) on things and let you know whether the I/O lets up at all. I'd *still* like to know why I don't seem to be able to disable journaling despite the Apple dox saying I can.

Added later: well, I can conclusively state that it's probably NOT the Spotlight indexing that is putting the load on my CPU (as it appears under 'Finder' in Activity Monitor) or motivating all the drive I/O I hear (I presume the CPU and drive activity are related since they come and go together). As you can see from the enclosed cap, I've got all three (internal/active) hard drives loaded into Spotlight's Privacy pane, which should presumably exclude them/everything from indexing, yet the CPU and I/O are both busy anyway.

I still suspect disk journaling, but that's only because I have no other ideas.

[MasterDragonfly]

I'd be surprised if it were the disk journaling, for the simple reason that journaling is an on-the-fly function, and not something which batches to be run at a later time.  If there are no processes writing to disk, there should be no journaling operations.  (Journaling is only triggered for writes, so reading from disk shouldn't be accessing that operation.)

Assuming that you go through the aggravation of migrating your system from journaled filesystems to non-journaled filesystems, the first ungraceful shutdown (through power failure or pressing the power button for 5+ seconds to get past an uncommon wedging) could cause some loss somewhere.  Unfamiliar as I am with hfs when it does NOT have journaling, I can't say whether the bootup recovery will take longer (as ext2 would on Linux) to go through the filesystem check to verify that everything is good (or conversely, to flag unrecoverable files as unrecoverable, etc.  (I just has a look and didn't see a lost+found directory, so I'm guessing hfs/OSX does something different.)  Wild speculation, but you might not notice a missing file on a non-journaled hfs filesystem until you try to access it.

Just thinking out loud here, but do you use MobileMe?  Do you have it set to sync anything?  If so, what is the sync set for, Auto, Hourly, etc?  (I've no idea whether these would directly spike Finder, but I thought I'd ask.)

Something else to try:

In Activity Monitor, double-click on Finder when it starts smokin' your CPU.  In the ensuing popup window, click on Open Files and Ports, and browse through the list there to see if anything there jumps out at you.  (Optionally copy/paste this back to this thread (or to a tech forum if you're asking there as well) for other sets of eyes, but be advised that it will likely display your home dir name under /Users so you might want to blotch that out.)

Optionally click on Sample, then play with Percentage of Parent and/or Percentage of Thread.  Browse on through (or as before, copy/paste to a tech thread) to see if something jumps out at you.

[Chestnuts]

The only time my Mac chugs at all is during Time Machine backups; Mobile Me sync doesn't cause that in my experience.

[Palomine]

I'm not using Mobile Me. I am listening to disk chug right now for no apparent reason.

As my hackintoshing attempt (on that dual-Xeon box) isn't going all that swimmingly, I've just downloaded and burned an install CD (yes, it fits on a CD... not a DVD!) of Ubuntu 9.10 which, when/if I reconcile myself to *not* having a dual-Xeon Hackintosh, I'll probably install instead.

I'm not anti-Linux... I've installed it a couple of times for others, and played with it a bit here and there and am (of course) a fan of open-source and Linux as a philosophy. However, I just happen to *really like* OSX (which is the larger part of what makes a Mac a Mac IMO) and frankly, I'd rather stick with OSX rather than adding yet another operating system in the house.

I'm still 100% OPEN to any suggestions about what I might do to minimize the CPU load I'm seeing (and hearing, with its associated disk I/O) so as to help keep my Mac usable for a while longer. TIA!

[SwitcherX]

How much memory, and especially irtual memory, is the system using when the I/O start thrashing?

Pal replies: next time I hear it, I'll take a cap of the Memory tab from Activity Monitor. Thanks.

[Chestnuts]

Ever since upgrading to 10.5, I've been noticing what seems like a lot more disk activity for no discernible reason. Even with every single app closed (nothing other than Finder running) I sometimes hear the hard disks busy at work... and the CPU load for the Finder at those times varies from about 25 to as much as 40%. This didn't seem to be so noticeable under 10.3 (my prior version of the OS) but now, it seems a bit much. When the drives occasionally go relatively quiet, the % of CPU the Finder is using drops to <5%... and the whole system feels a bit faster. AFAICT, nothing I'm actively doing makes the drives start or stop yapping... it seems to be something that the OS is dealing with, not me.

The only thing I can ?THINK? of (at the moment/I'm open to other suggestions) is that the I/O and CPU load are due to ongoing journaling of the (3) 500 gig hard drive volumes on the machine. I know journaling is supposed to make recovering from a crash easier/better, but it's been literally YEARS since I've had a full system crash of that sort... and if it's journaling that's responsible for this ongoing burden, I'd like to try turning it off.

So, my questions:

Can I deactivate journaling for one or all drives? In Disk Utility I see there's a button to *enable* journaling (though it's greyed out) but I don't see a button (or toggle) to turn journaling off. Is there another way to turn it off/disable it on a volume that's currently listed as 'journaled' in Disk Utility? Or once the choice has been made, are you stuck with it until the next time the disk is formatted?

Also, what (aside from the better recovery from crashes thing) is the advantage of journaling a volume? Does it make filename searches faster or something like that too? Is it a must-have thing, or something that can be lived without?

Finally, if it's NOT possible to disable journaling on a disk once it's been started/assigned, I *assume* that I can just install another disk, format it as Mac OS Extended (WITHOUT journaling) and then copy all the stuff from a journaled disk to the non-journaled disk, right? Then I can just remove the journaled disk or erase/reformat it as a non-journaled disk.

TIA for any feedback.

The cap below shows a very dramatic 61% CPU load by the Finder, with almost nothing else (separate) running. An unusually high spike, but illustrative.

Rethinking things a bit - When your G4 was built, a big drive was considerably smaller than what you are pulling now, maybe your Mac's processor is crying under the load with having to journal. Journaling is a good thing, but maybe not for your setup. As per SwitcherX, you may not have enough ram (or literally can not install enough ram in a G4) to counter that.

Pal replies: I have 1.75 gig of RAM in the G4 Mac, out of a possible 2 gig max. There always *appears* to be plenty of RAM left per Activity Monitor, so I don't *think* the machine is going into swap. The attached cap from A.M. was taken during what I'd describe as moderate thrashing (CPU and I/O usage): the Finder was peaking CPU demand at 68% (and I was barely doing anything) and at that time there was over 700 MBs of Free (green) RAM in the System Memory pie chart.

Per the Apple document I linked below, it ***SHOULD be possible to disable disk journaling*** using the Option key in Disk Utility to get the hidden menu choices. However, I DON'T seem to have that option for some unknown reason: in the File menu, "Enable Journaling" is greyed out, and it does NOT change to "Disable Journaling" when I press the Option key (though other menu choices DO change when Optioned). I'd LIKE to turn journaling off, even just briefly, for a test... to see if it helps at all.

My hackintoshing effort will be coming to a (probably unsuccessful) close soon, since the PC in my possession (which is half the age and several times the CPU power of my Mac) seems poorly suited to hackintoshing. I'm not sure what I'll do at that point... probably try Linux on it (the PC) since it seems silly to buy a new Mac when there's a fast enough machine in the house (the PC)... I just *really* prefer to stick with OSX, hence my interest in squeezing every last bit of usable performance out of my ancient G4 and also my reluctance to give up entirely on the hackintosh thing (yet).

Cap showing Real and Virtual Memory usage for Finder while it's using 68% of the CPU for no discernible reason:

[MasterDragonfly]

A quick Google found these of possible helpfulness:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=375176

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041209181913938

I'm guessing you've already seen these...?

Pal replies: thanks for the info... some of what's being discussed there are things we've already covered here/ruled out (i.e.: I'm not using Spotlight, or Time Machine, etc...) but I will look over those threads in more detail later today. At least it sort of confirms that I'm not the only one experiencing such unexplained thrashing. Much appreciated.

Added later:

OK, so I read through all the various posts in those two threads: some of it doesn't apply to me as mentioned: folks are reducing CPU usage by deselecting features/functions that I never use or deactivated ages ago such as Time Machine, Spotlight indexing, various kinds of view options like Show Item Info and Show Item Preview, and so on. I *do* usually have 'calculate file sizes' turned on as a default (so I can know how big a folder is) and I've just turned that off (though I'll miss it) to see if it helps reduce the CPU thrashing at all.

Since there seem to be a few different 'fixes' for the problem, it seems to me that not everyone who experiences it is actually suffering from the same issue. I.e.: a guy turns off Show Item Preview and his CPU drain stops, while another guy (such as me) never had it on to begin with and his CPU still churns. So, the 'fixes' are best taken with a grain of salt IMO.

One of the other 'fixes' that got some positive feedback that I have NOT tried is the removal of some preference files: User->Library->Preferences folder: com.apple.finder.plist, com.apple.systemuiserver.plist, com.apple.loginwindow.plist. As I don't really know what these are for, I'm reluctant to delete them... also I find it odd that a bloated preference file would somehow be responsible for the symptoms. Some folks deleted these files and reported an improvement, others delete them and reported no improvement.

There are other theories involving the size of open windows in pixels, phases of the moon, etc... things do seem a bit quieter (for the moment) since I globally deactivated all 'calculate file sizes' but it's WAY too soon to draw any conclusions.  


Weird.  Coulda sworn there was another mention somewhere of resetting the NVRAM or some such.  Maybe that was a 3rd link that I didn't share that I thought was included in the above.  Sorry for losing the breadcrumbs on that one, but bear that in mind.

[Chestnuts]

Just fishin' -


Or try a program like DiskWarrior or something similar, to fix the directory . . . etc.

I don't have the latest version of Diskwarrior, but it's straightened things out for me several times in the past.

[Palomine]

Just fishin' -


Or try a program like DiskWarrior or something similar, to fix the directory . . . etc.

I don't have the latest version of Diskwarrior, but it's straightened things out for me several times in the past.

First of all, I *LOVE* Disk Warrior and have recommended it to literally dozens of people over the years... Alsoft should have me on their payroll. My own copy of DW is old too: it predates OSX and thus, it would now be useless to me if disaster DID strike... though it's a legal/kosher/purchased copy that I paid full retail for, and though it resolved some serious OS9 hard drive issues (OS9 was not nearly as good as OSX re: file/drive corruption during sudden power outages, nor did it automatically deal with defragmentation like OSX does) I never upgraded Disk Warrior as I've never lost (or even corrupted) a hard drive in any version of OSX ever. I expect that by now, I'd just have to buy a new copy of DW (rather than an upgrade) since my original is so many years out-of-date. Anyway...

I don't know that there's anything much wrong with any of the directories... whenever I periodically run Disk Utility it finds/fixes a few 'minor' things, but never anything serious... the kinds of small stuff (headers/forks/etc...) that are inevitable on a machine with zillions of files that's on and active as much as mine is.

I will say that since I turned off the View>Show View Options>Calculate File Sizes (use as default) I haven't noticed as much CPU or disk activity. I turned it back on briefly and again started seeing/hearing some moderate thrashing, but as there are so many variables I'm not sure of anything at this point. One added complication that even when you set it ON, it doesn't seem to be a global (or recursive) setting... that is to say even if you select the whole drive (top level in the GUI) and turn Calculate File Sizes *ON* ***AND*** check "use as default" it does ***NOT*** mean that every *existing* window in that drive will now display folder sizes automatically (just those created AFTER the setting was changed I'm assuming). Thus, it's difficult to establish a truly firm cause-and-effect about CPU/IO loading specifically related to that function. My test to TRY to make that determination was as follows:

With it set ON in most places (commonly-used folders that contain lots of sub-folders) I intermittently/unpredictably experience moderate to severe CPU/IO thrashing (activity) per my original post in this thread.

I turn it OFF at all three top-level drives and thrashing seems reduced (though since it's not recursive, the "Calculate Size" setting is still actually set to ON in many places).

I turn it back ON at all three top-level drives and things are still quiet (which makes me think it's not actually USING my setting change yet).

I open some big folders (containing thousands of sub-folders) and start hearing some thrashing.

I turn it OFF again in those big folders, but thrashing continues unabated.

I then restart the machine (with it OFF in most places... at least in those with lots of sub-folders) and it's moderately quiet again.

...from this, it would SEEM I could blame at least SOME of the thrashing on "Calculate All Sizes" but ONLY IF I assume that it does NOT become active immediately upon being turned on nor does it become inactive immediately upon being turned off. Since those are a couple of not-insignificant assumptions, I'm not nearly 100% sure whether I've actually determined (let alone actually improved) ANYthing. For now, I'll just keep manually/locally setting it to OFF whenever I'm moving around the file system and keep an ear out for when/if the dreaded thrashing returns. To be honest, it strikes me as ODD that simply asking it to sum up file sizes (which it already knows and displays automatically) so that folder sizes will also be displayed would cause SUCH a burden on CPU/IO. But then again, there are a LOT of folders on my drives and the machine only has a 1GHz CPU to work with, so maybe...

For tonight anyway (with it OFF and things seeming fairly quiet at the moment) it does feel like I've squeezed a bit more moxie out of the machine with the (temporarily?) lightened CPU/IO load, but it's possible that's just my imagination too.

Thanks to all for the continued help.

Added 2/24/10: I see now that with all three drives added to Spotlight's Privacy tab (in preferences) the system will no longer do ANY finding of files at all... not even the plain/regular command-F Find File. So, of course, I had to take the drives out of the privacy window so they can again be searched... been noticing SOME increased CPU/drive activity (which I assume is Spotlight indexing again) but so far (early days yet) it's bearable.