Twitter is down. Gmail isn’t working. At this rate..
..I’ll have to go and use Facebook. It just seems like every so often, Gmail (or possibly Apple Mail) just decides it’s had enough. This often happens at around the same time that the overload of Flash ads from the million tabs I’ve got open in my browser decide to gang up on the CPU and swallow it. And of course NetNewsWire also thinks it’s a good time to take 102% (two CPU cores, so 200% available) of available cycles.
Basically, can’t get anything done that involves the web. Which is really frustrating.
Then it all eases up again - usually without having to restart everything. At which point email floods in. And there’s always too much email. And huge amounts of it are crap. I really, really need a smart program that can sift through that stuff and find the useful stuff.
But the lack of Twitter is amazingly frustrating. This must be what mental cold turkey feels like.
No, not serious about Facebook. Too slow and boring.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Survivors: how not to do an all-round media experience (updated) (27 November 2008; score: 60.6%)
- Gmail invites - I got them if you want them (23 March 2005; score: 59.68%)
- Gmail praise: cool front page, excellent spam filtering (17 April 2005; score: 54.97%)
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November 18th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Maybe you don’t have enough RAM? It sounds unlikely for a guy like you, but on my 2GB Mac mini, I regularly open up more than a hundred tabs in Safari, awaiting reading (although if you leave all those tabs open for like, a day, Safari just slows to a crawl, that’s *my* pet peeve). However, I never have any trouble with Gmail working through Apple Mail at all no matter how loaded up Safari is — it simply makes no difference.
Don’t know about Twitter though I haven’t gotten too into that yet.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
For the Flash problems, you could try switching to Firefox and install the FlashBlock extension.
Cheers,
- Mike
November 19th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Did you see this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALbH63Ali9U
Take it as a warning… :)
November 20th, 2008 at 11:57 am
And the warning would be…don’t let teenagers near a video camera?
Charles,
How much space do you have left on the hard drive? I was seriously thinking about defragging mine until I decided simply to clear a whole bunch of junk off and get the unused space from around 10 per cent to more like 30 per cent. This has made the machine work much more smoothly although I’m still not clear why. There was enough room for the swap file on disk but it seems OS X likes to have a lot of space on disk as it shovels data in and out of virtual memory.
NetNewsWire shouldn’t take up a bunch of cycles, so it sounds as though it, or the OS doing work for it, is thrashing around.
Another possibility may be that one of the system logging processes has gone crazy. I had one balloon to about 2GB and brought the machine to its knees as it kept writing messages to itself about how dangerously big the log file was. OS X’s Unix underbelly is good most of the time, but sometimes it really goes pear-shaped.
If anyone finds a bulletproof way of sifting through irrelevant emails, I’m in. However, I am thinking seriously of putting a rule on the server to flush anything with an attachment bigger than 100KB straight to the spam bucket unless the sender’s on a whitelist.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
You could just do some work…
wg