site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com On 17 Sep 2010, at 22:46, dgatwood@apple.com wrote:

My advice would be to take advantage of the performance profiling tools in Instruments to find out which system calls your application is spending a lot of time doing, then find ways to reduce the number of times you call them. For example, read data from disk in larger chunks. Reuse large memory allocations instead of releasing them and re-allocating them. And so on.

It seems that in this case it's allegedly an overheating problem with the MacBook Air. In reaction to that, the kernel apparently reserves fake cpu time to let the system cool down (and since it has a higher priority than everything else, this will stop cpu-hogging/heating tasks). There's some background info at http://tech.superhappykittymeow.com/?p=258 (although I would strongly recommend *against* following the advice in that article, since as a result you may risk overheating your system). Some people have reportedly had success in alleviating the issue with "undervolting" their system via a third party utility called CoolBook (http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330365-263.html), which is presumably the "additional software" David Wu was referring to in his original message. To David: it helps if you link to whatever you find on the Internet so that other people don't have to perform the same searches as you did to figure out what you are talking about. In the end, it appears to be a hardware design problem of the MacBook Air (and/or usage for which the MacBook Air is not designed, depending on your point of view), and there's nothing that your software can do about that. Jonas _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com