Seeking suggestions for extending life of Mac Pro 3,1

[goMac]

Yosemite, it seems, is really tuned to eat all the RAM it can and assume there is a fast swap volume backing it. I don't know if this is a bug or what, but it's not making anyone's experience better.

Unless you put a seriously insane amount of RAM in your machine, Yosemite will continue to gobble all of it up.

Seems like you've figured out it's a Yosemite issue. Mavericks has similar issues, but not nearly as severe.

 

[Cancaro]

Ignoring the immediately prior response, I would like to thank all responders and closeout this thread.



I now suspect Meister is correct and it is not a hardware or configuration issue. After trolling a bit more through other forums, I'm believing it is a software issue with Yosemite. In particular, there are numerous complaints by other users of iMac including new 5K, MBP, and even nMP where they are talking about slow animation when using mission control and switching spaces. Since my problems really began after using Yosemite I now believe this is Yosemite related.

Since my last writing I noticed overnight that my Swap Used increased. After a reboot it was back at 0. I've gone back to using Spaces in a limited fashion, only 3 Spaces for the time being. I also found some setting changes on OSXDaily to reduce Mission Control/Spaces animation and have implemented those. I'm now experiencing Spaces workspace changes which are only slightly longer than 1 second. I'm going to continue to monitor my memory usage. I've started taking snapshots of that window so that I might determine if there is some pattern.

Returning to my hardware configuration. As I previously mentioned, I liked SpecFoto's recommended Raid configuration for my storage and plan on implementing that configuration.

As to hardware upgrade, I'm still thinking of spending a bit of money on my current machine. In particular, I think I'm going to repurpose my current SSD to another Mac or as a Bootcamp partition and switch to an OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 as my primary OS X and User partition. I suspect that will get my current MacPro to its performance limits. Additionally, since I have external eSata storage, when I eventually get a nMP I would move the Accelsior to an OWC Mercury Helios and use it as a fast external drive and interface to my eSata enclosures.

Again thanks for the constructive suggestions and help.

: rolleyes:


I'm sorry that you have offended, but also I have a mac-pro as your and I realized that now is not worth anything more !!
At most you can surf Facebook or Wikipedya and enough!
Obsolete and outdated really unnecessary, see to throw it away and get a new thing, as I did.

Excuse me if I tell the hard truth, but the thing is so, you can not deny it.
You can ignore me, but the truth remains that I say.
Good luck.

 

[reco2011]

I assume that the OP issuing RAID 1 to safeguard against drive failure but as I already pointed out Software RAID 1 on OS X is very slow. The IO doesn't complete until it's been written to both drives so effectively your IO rate is 50% that of a single drive. Those 3GB RAID 1 volumes are only capable of half the IO rate of a single 3GB drive.

Unless Apple implemented RAID 1 very poorly a write to a RAID 1 device shouldn't take twice as long. The writes can be issued to each drive in parallel thus avoiding the impact of issuing them sequentially. There will be a slight performance decrease but certainly not on the order of 50%. Aside from benchmarks it's unlikely the end user would notice.

 

[mac567]

If your apps dont need to use all 8 cores at 2.8ghz try upgrading to 3.4ghz
X5272 SLANH they are only dual cores but the boost I got from 8x2.8ghz to 4x3.4ghz was pretty good for a processor that is 20usd on eBay.

 

[nigelbb]

Unless Apple implemented RAID 1 very poorly a write to a RAID 1 device shouldn't take twice as long. The writes can be issued to each drive in parallel thus avoiding the impact of issuing them sequentially. There will be a slight performance decrease but certainly not on the order of 50%. Aside from benchmarks it's unlikely the end user would notice.

I tested RAID 1 on OS X some years ago & can only conclude that Apple implemented RAID 1 very poorly. Performance for writes was down about 50%.

 

[reco2011]

If your apps dont need to use all 8 cores at 2.8ghz try upgrading to 3.4ghz
X5272 SLANH they are only dual cores but the boost I got from 8x2.8ghz to 4x3.4ghz was pretty good for a processor that is 20usd on eBay.

Something has to be wrong with the system. There's no reason his system can't reasonably handle his workload. As others have stated less capable systems can handle it.

Perhaps start with the basics such as re-installing the OS and applications. While there's nothing to suggest this would solve the problem it wouldn't cost anything other than time.

 

[Meister]

Unless Apple implemented RAID 1 very poorly a write to a RAID 1 device shouldn't take twice as long. The writes can be issued to each drive in parallel thus avoiding the impact of issuing them sequentially. There will be a slight performance decrease but certainly not on the order of 50%. Aside from benchmarks it's unlikely the end user would notice.

The OP has no plausible reason to set up any RAID system imo.
It's just another part that can go wrong.

 

[stjames70]

Too many open apps

I am personally running eight of these machines with various memory and storage configurations in my office. The OP would find the same problems even with the nMP -- I would suggest that the OP restart his machine and see how fast it runs when he boots it up. I am thinking that it would run quite well and quite fast. It does not help that he uses it as a mail server, and that he has multiple browsers open. Did you ever notice how Flash taxes any browser or computer? Check power usage when a browser is running Flash. Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he said it was crap back then -- it still is. Also, if his computer is constantly fetching email, that will slow down any computer.

Basically I think the OP is abusing his computer and expecting it to perform well at the same time. Good luck with that. No combination of new hardware or upgrades is going to resolve his problem. Buying a nMP may help for awhile, but trust me, he will find a way to slow it down. I don't know if he needs that many apps open at once, but the way he uses his computer does not seem efficient.

People can't multitask -- scientifically proven -- so why have so many apps open at once if you can only concentrate on one or two at a time?

 

[rkv]

The OP has no plausible reason to set up any RAID system imo.
It's just another part that can go wrong.

I agree that I don't need this stuff. The major reason for my having two mirrored volumes is that I'm phobic about disk failures. Additionally, I really like Time Machine and have been trying to maintain that on an increasingly larger mirrored volume. I don't want a disk failure to destroy some of TM's history. Although, I would admit the number of times I've actually needed to use TM is quite low. My MP, storage, and monitors are on a pretty hefty UPS. Basically, enough so that I could keep working for a bit and gracefully shutdown when there are power grid issues. Here again, I've only needed it on a couple of occasions due to construction related interrupts to grid power.

As part of my future storage plans, I hope to move toward Thunderbolt Raid of some form. Historically, I've always wanted Raid 6 and have looked at CalDigit and Pegasus but never pulled the trigger because of cost. I'm one of those people who would have been happy to move to ZFS if Apple had gone down that route for OS X Server.

I have to admit that most of this is not justified by my use of my MacPro. I like technology. High performance, high availability and resilient system gives me piece of mind. A few years back I had the experience of a number of disk failures. It was 4 or 5 in a two or three month period. All from one particular third party external drive purveyor. It certainly was a nuisance. Since then, I've been a bit phobic about disk failures and wanting them to be complete non events.

Also, as to my current Raid I have used both Apple's as well as SoftRAID's offering. They have both worked flawlessly. Also, SoftRAID's support has been the best I've ever experienced. The only issue I ever had was with RAID 0 volumes. That's what I was running when I had the previously mentioned period of disk failures. I've limited my RAID 0 use since then. Although at that time I needed to do it because of capacity needs.

 

[reco2011]

People can't multitask -- scientifically proven -- so why have so many apps open at once if you can only concentrate on one or two at a time?

I agree with this. However multitasking operating systems will minimize the impact of background applications. For example an applications memory space will be paged to disk thus freeing up memory for foreground applications. This won't eliminate a background applications impact on the system but it will reduce it. This reduction will therefore allow more applications to be loaded at the same time.

I am in complete agreement with web browsers. It is amazing how something so basic in concept can consume so many resources. Often times I find myself waiting and waiting and waiting for a web browser. Not because the network connection is slow but because of all the scripts that have to be run for web pages. Sometimes I feel like it was faster back in the dial up days.

----------

I agree that I don't need this stuff. The major reason for my having two mirrored volumes is that I'm phobic about disk failures.

A wise man if you've got a lot of important information stored on them. I can't tell you how many of my friends have lost important information due to disk failures. Too many people don't care about it until too late.

 

[lwwz]

Glad you figured out what many others including myself suffered through.

I also have a MP 3,1 although mine has been significantly upgraded over the years. Between 64GB of RAM, Radeon HD5770 1GB video card, Intel Zeon quad-core X5482 3.2Ghz cpu's, 2 Intel 320 series 600GB SSDs in a RAID1 for my boot partition and 4 Samsung 850Pro 1GB SSDs in a RAID10 for my 2TB data drive.

When I installed Yosemite, it slowed to A CRAWL! I couldn't watch a low res video off YouTube without stutter and jitter. I was AMAZED that something could run so poorly. Granted, my Mac, even upgraded, is built on a foundation that's 6 years old but it was truly astonishing. As soon as I turned off transparency and the animations, my system load dropped back to the normal 5%-10% while idle, where before it was running all 8 cores nearly pegged at 95%+ making everything respond painfully slowly.

I considered downgrading but turning off the eye-candy is fine for me. I use my rig as my general purpose desktop, video conferencing, for light video editing and mostly transcoding so I don't need the eye candy. I have plenty of that on my gaming rig that makes a nMP look like garage sale bargain...

Yes, I am a little twisted. I don't need the latest and greatest for my desktop apps and I expect to get at least several more years out of this old work horse. I REALLY don't like the style of the new trashcan inspired MP and the latest and greatest will go in my gaming rig which is unfortunately cursed to run Winhose until game developers and players finally switch to Ubuntu...

 

[Inutopia]

I don't think it's the CPU. I have the same machine (2008 2.8 Octo) and use it for Photoshop, Lightroom and Final Cut. Still flies through these programs even after all this time. Still fine for all the office type stuff too, like web browser, word etc.

All this and I only have a shocking 12gb of memory too, the horror!!

Did he say if he'd done a clean instal of the OS recently? I'd wager it's that, or otherwise something is on it's way out. Also could be GPU I suppose, I've upgraded mine a few times over the years.

Cheers

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I don't think it's the CPU. I have the same machine (2008 2.8 Octo) and use it for Photoshop, Lightroom and Final Cut. Still flies through these programs even after all this time. Still fine for all the office type stuff too, like web browser, word etc.

All this and I only have a shocking 12gb of memory too, the horror!!

Did he say if he'd done a clean instal of the OS recently? I'd wager it's that, or otherwise something is on it's way out. Also could be GPU I suppose, I've upgraded mine a few times over the years.

Cheers

Just scanned back at the OP, he doesnt seem to mention having upgraded the GPU ever, if so the graphics card that came with the 2008s will probably struggle with both those displays at once, that's 2 very high res displys being asked to do all the gpu rendering of the fancy OS X desktop on an ancient GPU.

That gets my vote.

 

[lwwz]

Just scanned back at the OP, he doesnt seem to mention having upgraded the GPU ever, if so the graphics card that came with the 2008s will probably struggle with both those displays at once, that's 2 very high res displys being asked to do all the gpu rendering of the fancy OS X desktop on an ancient GPU.

That gets my vote.

That is a great point. The old ATI Radeon HD2600xt was fine back in 2008 but is fairly pitiful by today's standards especially with those high res displays and all the eye candy on Yosemite.

I picked up my ATi Radeon HD5770 flashed for a Mac for $89 and it solved my failing fan bearing problem on my old 2600xt and significantly improved my GPU performance.

My next upgrade will probably be a GeForce GTX 680 or an nVidia Quadro K5000 once they get down to the $250 range.

 

[goMac]

That is a great point. The old ATI Radeon HD2600xt was fine back in 2008 but is fairly pitiful by today's standards especially with those high res displays and all the eye candy on Yosemite.

Unfortunately almost all the new eye candy in Yosemite is rendered on the CPU.

I know, right?

 

[lwwz]

Unfortunately almost all the new eye candy in Yosemite is rendered on the CPU.

I know, right?

Oh, that sucks. Since I disabled most of the eye candy I hadn't noticed any problems and just attributed it to the GPU upgrade.

 

[TonyK]

First I'll acknowledge this is an old thread. But I too have a MacPro 3,1 (early 2008) and am running Yosemite with no issue. I do not use spaces at all but that is my preference.

My system has 32GB of memory in a 8 core system. The memory was purchased off eBay for a very good price and has been doing well for some time. The system also uses a m500 SSD (480GB after formatting).

What my system needs is a graphics card upgrade so I can use a Apple LED 27" monitor. Those babies only come with a mini-DisplayPort and my 2008 is still running the original 256MB ATI 2600 card.

Then again, my work computer is a Dell something or other running Windows 7 Pro and it was a dog until I killed all the eye candy left on from our IT department. Being a developer I don't need eye candy, I need speed.

Any recommendations for current graphic displays that come with a mini-DisplayPort and hopefully no external power needs is appreciated.

 

[JimmyPainter]

Running Mac Pro 3,1 10 Gig of Ram, NO SSD's curently. The Biggest shot in the Arm I have and makes my System "ROCK" is my $150 Used 7970. I kept the original Video card in there for boot. I am planning a PCI SSD card that is bootable. Probably a 256 Gig at min. Any Large video files I want to work on will be copied over here as needed from my 4 - 2tb Storage drives. If you need faster than this but are on a budget like me consider getting a 2009 Quad. Spend $250 on a 6 Core upgrade. Get 32Gig as more ram is NEVER a bad thing. Get you a used 7970 or R9 280. Then look here .. http://barefeats.com/hard210.html

 

[jmp473]

The Memory Pressure graphic nowadays is little to no indicator of what's actually going on - it hasn't been kept up to date it seems - or something? - I'd say.

I just added 32 GB RAM for less than $70.00 found it on eBay. This upped me from 4 GB @ 800Hz to total 36 GB @ 667 MHz. Speed's improve quite a bit. Graphics card is a (thanks Netkas!) flashed HD 5770 w/1 GB.

The Memory Pressure was always green and low - lower before - even when some tasks crashed inexplicably. Safari never showed using more than 2 GB used before but as I type this it's over 8 GB for Safari alone. Crashes have now stopped. But if anything, now Memory Pressure is actually registering higher! Apple says 2 GB is minimum for El Capitan but 4 GB for me - was problematic. From my usage it seems that (El Capitan at least) is geared at taking advantage of higher amounts of memory, and not so good at scaling things down to lower requirements, and the Memory Pressure graphic is now somewhat useless.