Hidden gems in Mac OS X

http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scripts-for-mac-os-x/

by ahalan • 14 years ago

345 50 14 years ago

mcav• 14 years ago

Is there anything that lets you view how much network _bandwidth_ an application is using? I've looked before with no luck.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

On linux there's nethogs. http://nethogs.sourceforge.net/

Apparently there's ntop which works on all platforms and has all kinds of snazzy features but I've never tried it personally. http://www.ntop.org/products/ntop/

kalleboo• 14 years ago

Since Lion, nettop ships with the system. Hit d to switch to delta instead of total usage, p for human-readable numbers, and left arrow to collapse into process names.

ryduh• 14 years ago

Awesome tip. Thanks!!!

wesley• 14 years ago

There's an app for that, http://rubbernetapp.com (not free)

sabon• 14 years ago

iStat pro widget gives you this info (and much more). Once installed, one key press (F4) and you've got all the info you need.

atopuzov• 14 years ago

Nice one. Getting to know DTrace was on my todo list for the next few moths.

timc3• 14 years ago

Excellent list, one of those things that I keep coming back to hacker news for.

euroclydon2• 14 years ago

One of the features that differentiated Macs from Windows early on for me was how they systemized PDFs. Not only could it read and write PDFs, it was eager to do so.

tedmiston• 14 years ago

It's really easy to create PDFs from Apple's built-in Quartz 2D drawing engine (of the Core Graphics framework). That probably has a lot to do with it.

rahoulb2• 14 years ago

And the reason for that is because NeXT used PostScript for rendering - use the same language for displaying on-screen as on paper. When NeXTStep became OSX PDF was used instead (I believe because of a bust up between Steve Jobs and Adobe over licensing)

Terretta• 14 years ago

Not sure if it qualifies as a "hidden gem" in OS X itself, but the new Signature management in Preview, using the built in iSight to scan a handwritten sig off a sheet of paper, is an amazing time saver.

// Number 8, bitesize.d, rocks.

charlieok• 14 years ago

This article is not like a lifehacker “10 neato things to be more productive on your mac” article. It's specifically about using DTrace to get detailed statistics on processes making system calls.

It's also several months old :)

LeafStorm• 14 years ago

Honestly, so far none of these have been the major performance bottleneck on my Macbook. For me, it's been RAM. Even though I have 4 GB of RAM, I have at least 3 GB wired or active at any given time - Chrome alone takes up roughly 1 GB of it, with all its helper processes. But unfortunately I really have no idea how to bring my RAM usage down.

yock• 14 years ago

You don't really want to bring your RAM usage down. Unused RAM is a performance hit. Sure, some applications are hogs and that can result in a performance hit for background processes and task switching, but high RAM utilization is GOOD for performance, not bad.

spiffytech• 14 years ago

High RAM utilization is only good when your RAM is topped off with cache and buffer use. It's bad when it's all consumed by program data that forces the OS to swap other running application stuff to disk, especially if you're using several programs at once.

larsberg2• 14 years ago

Agreed, particularly on my MacBook Air where ~1GB is reserved for the shared video memory. I have to close Firefox or Chrome if I want to do any development work (our research compiler is a bit of a memory hog) without having a process get swapped out.

I would offer ridiculous gobs of money to upgrade to even 6GB.

klausa• 14 years ago

Where did you get your ~1GB number? It's 384 megabytes on machines with 4GB, probably 256 on 2GB.

(If you have 13.3" MBP with 8GB of RAM, it carves out 512 MB for video memory.)

karlshea• 14 years ago

I had the same issue, and seriously: buy more RAM. A 2x4G kit from Crucial cost me $45 shipped.

secoif2• 14 years ago

And it's not much more of a financial leap to get to 16gb in a MacBook. 16.

kamechan• 14 years ago

sadly, can't upgrade the ram in the newer MBAs. this is the main reason i didn't keep mine (even though i wanted to)...VM + IDE + lots of browser instances open turned out to be kinda painful.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

This.

I don't have a MacBook, but upgrading 4 Gb to 16 Gb in my iMac made a huge difference.

gravitronic• 14 years ago

"Even though I have 40 employees, I have at least 30 employees working at any given time."

sad_panda• 14 years ago

My system starts to swap as it gets down to the last ~20% of its memory.

lysium2• 14 years ago

I had the same issue until I upgraded to 8 GB. I'd recommend to anybody to go for 8GB directly. For me (or any other heavy user), 4GB is just not enough to run MacOS X (the 'kernel_task' alone takes >500MB).

weaksauce• 14 years ago

I just upgraded to 16 gigs and it's amazing. The time for a suspend and restore of a parallels virtual instance went down by a large factor; it's now just 10 seconds to restore and 5 seconds to suspend with 2 gigs allocated to it.

pgebhard• 14 years ago

I wanted to pipe in to say the same thing. For the longest time, I thought my Late 2008 15" MBP couldn't handle 8GB (chipset issue, I though). I figured 6GB was the largest, and I just stayed with the 4GB as it came from the factory. Then one day late last year, I realized that a) the Late 2008 15" MBP can take 8GB and b) 8GB of RAM was now VERY affordable.

It made a huge difference. No more constant thrashing of the HDD as it tries to manage a large swap file.

zmonkeyz• 14 years ago

I hear you. I have a 2008 IMac and I wish i could put 8GB or more in it.

brown9-2• 14 years ago

About "why is my Macbook fan so loud?", has anyone successfully attempted to clean out dust from inside the laptop to reduce the fan noise?

dshep• 14 years ago

I did on my older MacbookPro5,1. It didn't even seem like I dislodged much dust, but it made a huge difference. Now the fans don't go above 3-4000 rpm even with the cpu pegged, which is quiet. Before it would consistently spin the fan at max speed even with modest cpu use. This old beast is far quieter under load than the new MacBook Air 13" I had for a week and returned.

MobWalk• 14 years ago

I'd suggest downloading smcFanControl. That's what I use on my MB Pro, and it works well. You can set different modes that will keep the fan at or below a certain RPM. If I'm gaming, I let it go up to 6200 rpm. If I'm not doing much (like now, just browsing on the internet and maybe running a couple other programs) I drop it to 3000rpm. That usually puts me around 45* C and keeps it nice and quiet. Then I've got a middle setting at about 4200rpm that makes some noise, but isn't quite as obnoxious as full throttle.

eropple• 14 years ago

Yup. Last time I opened it up (to replace the optical with a second SSD), I placed it electronics-down over open space (propped an edge against the table, held it up with a hand) and air-canned all the crap out of it.

vasco• 14 years ago

>> Why Unix? Mac OS X is Unix under the hood: the Darwin kernel

Just beeing pedantic but I think Darwin is the operating system, not the kernel. The kernel is Mach 3.

colinstrickland• 14 years ago

Well if we're being pedants about it, then the kernel is XNU ( http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1699.24.23/ )

lysium2• 14 years ago

I once tried to look into dtrace because I was missing strace from Linux. I gave up when I realized I had to learn a whole language just to do what strace did for me on Linux.

Now I'm enlightened to see there is dtruss. It works different than strace and needs privileges, but I'm glad that I've found the strace alternative.

Game_Ender• 14 years ago

dtrace is not supposed to replace strace on Linux. It's allows you track and process all sorts of parameters of your operating system and it's programs. It's essentially a quick way to introspect into your application without tons of printf hacks, and get to the buttom of bugs and performance issues.

lallysingh• 14 years ago

The language is really just awk.

teeray• 14 years ago

I never knew about this tool--my mind has been blown. Thank you OP!

Hidden gems in Mac OS X

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