Hello, I get the impression that many slowdowns in OS X are caused by an application causing a lot of disk access, which for some reason brings down the performance of other processes, even if they don't require so much disk access. For example, contextual menus in the Dock are terribly unresponsive while an application is lauching, which leads to stupid Dock behaviour if items are being added or removed (that's my personal experience on a Titanium Powerbook with loads or RAM); sometimes it is difficult only to drag a window. I was wondering why that is? Also, wouldn't it be possible for the kernel to implement some sort of throttling policy for disk access (for direct file i/o and for disk access caused by virtual memory paging)? Isn't that done on other OSes? I remember an early version of Omniweb had a terrible memory leak. It was thrashing memory so quickly that it was all but impossible to force-quit it! It's not good enough that an application can't crash the whole system, if it can make it so slow as to be unusable... I would be grateful for insights from kernel gurus! John _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.