Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Time to return to updating this blog.

macOS trouble

In the past three days, my Mac has been really sluggish, and running out of memory and out of disk space all the time. When I booted the machine, I had 17GB free. But that would steadily decrease over time, to the point where I had no disk space left, and then applications started running out of memory, network was unbearably slow, etc. This is with a machine that has 16GB of memory, and I was not even running virtual machines on it at the time it happened.

Some applications react well to lack of memory, like Terminal, which simply tells you it will stop recording its logs to disk. Neat.

Other applications are not so nice. Mail, for example, displays a dialog box with only one choice: "Quit". And then it does not save whatever you were doing. Bummer.

Apparently, the core culprit is Safari. On at least a couple of occasions, I caught it using 40GB of memory for a single tab. What is really strange is that it's for pages that don't seem to be doing anything fancy. One of them was a Google search, of all things! But on several other occasions, the system became unresponsive, popping the "out of memory" dialog box, and I could not get either top in a terminal or Activity Monitor to behave correctly without killing Safari first. Did not find anything suspicious in the system logs either.

After rebooting a couple of times and still seeing the problem reappear within hours, sometimes within minutes, I decided to reinstall the OS from backup. Did not help. So I ended up "upgrading" to High Sierra beta. Now the original problem is gone, but since this is a beta, I have quite a few other quirks. At least, I can report them to Apple with the Feedback Assistant.

Flight recorder

Frediano updated the frame capture code to C++, but that's somewhat beyond the capabilities of git rebase. So the recorder branch has to be re-constructed with this in mind.

Testing HP RGS

ddd@f25-turbo ~> cat /var/log/rg.log
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - #####################################################
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - #
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - # HP Remote Graphics Sender
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - # Version: 7.3.3.12135
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - # Build Date: May 16 2017
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - # License Version Date: 2014.0401
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - #
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - #####################################################
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Model            : Exception caught. Failed to initialize WSTL. ACPI MCFG Exception. PCI Configuration space functionality unavailable
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Serial number    :
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - BIOS UUID        : Exception caught. Failed to initialize WSTL. ACPI MCFG Exception. PCI Configuration space functionality unavailable
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Number of Cores  : 4
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is HP System     : 0
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is VDI           : 0
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is Blade         : 0
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is WS Blade      : 0
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is iLO Graphics  : 0
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is iLO Enabled   : 0
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is Touch Enabled : 0
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Graphic Adapters : Unknown
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - OSVersionString  : Fedora release 25 (Twenty Five)
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Hostname         : f25-turbo.dinechin.lan
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is RedHat        : 1
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is Gnome Running : 1
09-13-17 16:04:51 INFO  - Is Gnome SSaver  : 1
09-13-17 16:04:51 ERROR - X11RemoteGraphicsExt::ConnectRge() caught connect to socket failed: No such file or directory connecting to RG X Extension!
09-13-17 16:04:51 ERROR - X11RemoteGraphicsExt::X11RemoteGraphicsExt() error connecting to Remote Graphics Extension!