Mavericks is getting on my last nerve

[FMiguelez]

Maldita sea!

This thread is SO annoying!!!
I was ready to instal Mavericks in my new master computer, and take the time to update all the slaves too. But I am seeing too many complaints, and my patience for computer-related crap is non-existing.

It doesn't sound too good.

OTOH, I suppose Apple will come out with a Maverick update soon?

And then, even more annoyingly, you have people like MLC, who seems to not be experiencing any of the anomalies you guys have talked about, or Shooshie, whose system was working and now it's suddenly getting stupid. So this is one of those mysteries, when things work on some systems but not on others (the worst kind).

I don't really care about scrolling funkiness in other apps, as long as DP8 runs at least as perfect as DP7 has been for me. I'm worried about those hanging notes and MIDI bombs some people here experience constantly (there was a recent thread about that, VE Pro and a Mac Mini just like mine, of course)

I dunno... Should I be brave and optimist going all the way to Mavericks and the latest everything? It's a totally new system I got here, so I suppose the odds have been reset...

Yeah, what the hell. I guess I'll be brave and try it. There must be an Apple update coming soon anyway.

I suppose I'll write a report here, hopefully with good news.

[bayswater]

I'm getting memory leaks that fill up and disable 40 GB of RAM. Those seem to be coming from Safari when there are a lot tabs open

Wow, something is very wrong. I wonder how much of these persistent problems are specific to certain MP models?

I was seeing some run away processes on the MBP for a while, causing apparent memory leaks, but the various advice on deleting plists, installing updates, killing processes, etc, made it all go away. It's still having the occasional senior moment when it ignores input devices.

I put 10.9 on my main mac's test partition a week ago, and that has been ok so far, except for the often mentioned erratic behaviour of the magic trackpad. I can't say I've seen the performance boost that so many mentioned when 10.9.0 was released. The main partition on that mac will be happy staying with ML for a while.

[Shooshie]

Maldita sea!

This thread is SO annoying!!!
I was ready to instal Mavericks in my new master computer, and take the time to update all the slaves too. But I am seeing too many complaints, and my patience for computer-related crap is non-existing.

It doesn't sound too good.

OTOH, I suppose Apple will come out with a Maverick update soon?

And then, even more annoyingly, you have people like MLC, who seems to not be experiencing any of the anomalies you guys have talked about, or Shooshie, whose system was working and now it's suddenly getting stupid. So this is one of those mysteries, when things work on some systems but not on others (the worst kind).

I don't really care about scrolling funkiness in other apps, as long as DP8 runs at least as perfect as DP7 has been for me. I'm worried about those hanging notes and MIDI bombs some people here experience constantly (there was a recent thread about that, VE Pro and a Mac Mini just like mine, of course)

I dunno... Should I be brave and optimist going all the way to Mavericks and the latest everything? It's a totally new system I got here, so I suppose the odds have been reset...

Yeah, what the hell. I guess I'll be brave and try it. There must be an Apple update coming soon anyway.

I suppose I'll write a report here, hopefully with good news.

Honestly, I'd hold off Mavericks until the next update. But if you do go ahead with it, DP will probably run fine. I've been recording and mixing audio (not MIDI), and I haven't had any trouble at all except for the erratic faders, and they work fine if I grab them and move them the way we used to do it before "scrolling" became its own thing. So far, DP has plugged away as it always has, impervious to the crap that other apps bring to the party. Of course, I usually restart my Mac and run only what is necessary to that session. On the other hand, when mixing for long periods I tend to leave DP open for days on end without rebooting. That means that when I run Safari, iTunes, or anything else, it keeps maintaining its memory in the background without issues.

When this memory leak in Safari reaches a head, OS X pauses all the processes it can and displays a dialog inviting you to quit or un-pause the app you're in. I've found that if I just force-quit Safari, the rest of the running processes can then be unpaused and things will go back to normal, more or less. I usually restart after that, and check the logs to see what happened. Best I can tell, it's Safari, and it happens when I've got 30 or 40 tabs open to large photos, mostly. (I like good railroad and scenic photography and treat the tabs like a slide show) It could have something to do with the website programming, but it was never a problem until very recently. iTunes may also be a culprit, but I can't say for sure.

I think that most of the Mavericks problems are not threatening, just annoying. This memory leak thing is new for me, and I don't know where to place the blame yet. As Mike Halloran said, every system call gets recorded in the log, so figuring out what is just repetitive or intermittent vs. what is malignant requires getting very familiar with what your logs say, then finding the one thing that only happens when it crashes, and that always crashes when it happens. With so many niggling little problems, I haven't identified those particular items for each problem yet.

Shooshie

[James Steele]

Can you revert to ML Shooshie? Sounds like it may be worth it!

I'm going to ride it out. My next big move will be to reinstall Mavericks if the crashes get worse. I'm getting memory leaks that fill up and disable 40 GB of RAM. Those seem to be coming from Safari when there are a lot tabs open. If I can control them by going easy on Safari and keeping it closed when I'm not using it, then I'll make it until the next update.

I really don't want to get caught up in figuring out what works with ML vs. Mavericks, so I'd rather just stick with it. In the meantime, I'd love to get involved in building a fire under Apple to fix it.

Shooshie

Again, Shooshie, I'm fairly wracked with guilt that I steered you toward Mavericks thinking the coast was more clear than it was. I learned of some of these issues too late. I'm not pleased with Apple on this one.

Oh... and please somebody tell me if it's just me or does the search capability in the version of Mail that is installed with Mavericks totally suck? I honestly cannot find anything I'm searching for. On top of it, searches in the Finder for filenames miss terms or "strings" that are in the middle of the filename and not the beginning. It's baffling to me.

[bayswater]

I use Mail searches quite a bit, and haven't noticed any big change. What would be an example of a search that doesn't work in your setup? The only problem I've had is some strangeness is the folders Mail decides to search in. You sometimes have to change it's selection.

On Finder searches, yes, the basic search will only look for a filename that "matches" the search string. But if you start a search with cmd-f, and click on the "+" sign (to the right of the drop down menu that says "Kind") to open up additional search criteria, you can select "Filename" in the first drop down menu (where it will say "Kind" by default), and "Contains" where it says "Any" by default. You can enter substrings for searches there.

Note that you also get these menus for additional search criteria when you use the search box in the upper right of the Finder window, but you have remove whatever you entered there before you proceed, so it's less convenient.

[Shooshie]

James, not to worry; your ok'ing of Mavericks wasn't the only thing that steered me toward it. I also read lengthy accounts of the OS in Ars Technica, and read the accounts by dozens of others. Plus, a part of me wanted to upgrade just to get my custom icons back. Several versions of OS X had been messing up custom icons, leaving you with either a low-res icon or no icon at all, where you knew positively that there was a hi-res icon installed. Mavericks fixed all those icons instantly simply by not causing them to break any more.

So, you bear 0% of the responsibility for my switching. Honestly and truly.

Meanwhile, I may have figured out why some people experience the Safari "back" & "forward" swipe problem. (and others don't)

I'm in the habit of using gestures very quickly. Previous OS's have allowed for that. Sometimes it feels like my hands are speaking sign language with my Mac, and I'm not even involved. So, when I need to go back a page, my hand reaches to the Magic Trackpad and gestures as fast as a snap of the fingers.

Usually, Safari catches it and does what it's told. Sometimes, however, it starts to move, then appears to hesitate and bounce back, at which point it hangs. After that, no gesture or button will get the page to change, and it requires reloading the page just to get the scroll bars and links working again. Only relaunching Safari will make it possible to use gestures again, and only a computer reboot will neutralize the bias against gestures completely.

But... I've found that if I do the gesture slowly, as if turning a page in a book, it seems to work all the time, assuming I haven't already broken the gesture privilege by flicking it too fast. So, maybe some people naturally do those gestures slow enough to see the animation. It's too soon to say with certainty that it works 100% of the time if I do it slowly, but so far I have a pretty good idea that it's going to work always if I just throttle down my gesture speed.

Not sure what's happening when I flick the page-back gesture too fast, but it seems to have to do with something getting out of sequence, and once that's happened it can't be fixed without rebooting either the app or the Mac.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

User error!?

[Shooshie]

User error!?

No, computer error. All previous versions of OS X handled the gesture without getting something out of order. For us suddenly to have to throttle it down (and with no explanation that this was required) points to a deficiency in the OS. If you crashed Safari every time you moved the mouse to the right, for example, you would learn to only cross the page moving left, then go around the page to get back to the right, but if you accidentally caused the crash, you wouldn't call that user error. (Well, I wouldn't, regardless of what you might do.)

So, no. It's not user error. It's a problem with something getting out of sequence under certain conditions which we still do not know. Moving slowly seems to avoid those conditions, whatever they are, for now. I'll let you know if the problem happens at a slow speed at some point.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Just teasing, man. I'm glad you figured it out!

[James Steele]

I use Mail searches quite a bit, and haven't noticed any big change. What would be an example of a search that doesn't work in your setup? The only problem I've had is some strangeness is the folders Mail decides to search in. You sometimes have to change it's selection.

On Finder searches, yes, the basic search will only look for a filename that "matches" the search string. But if you start a search with cmd-f, and click on the "+" sign (to the right of the drop down menu that says "Kind") to open up additional search criteria, you can select "Filename" in the first drop down menu (where it will say "Kind" by default), and "Contains" where it says "Any" by default. You can enter substrings for searches there.

Note that you also get these menus for additional search criteria when you use the search box in the upper right of the Finder window, but you have remove whatever you entered there before you proceed, so it's less convenient.

Here's a movie illustrating my issue. Seems the search box in the Finder defaults to "matches" not "contains". The latter seems like a much more reasonable default.



I also find that I have to have a search term in the default search box before options appear and if I add the "name" field to the detailed search criteria and change it to "contains" nothing appears either. I have to delete the criteria out of the main search box but then the advanced search criteria disappears.

In my example movie you can clearly see there's a filename that has "guidry" in it, yet Search doesn't find it. Is there way to change the default filename search to not look for a "match" but a "contains"?

[bayswater]

Here's a movie illustrating my issue. Seems the search box in the Finder defaults to "matches" not "contains". The latter seems like a much more reasonable default.



I also find that I have to have a search term in the default search box before options appear and if I add the "name" field to the detailed search criteria and change it to "contains" nothing appears either. I have to delete the criteria out of the main search box but then the advanced search criteria disappears.

In my example movie you can clearly see there's a filename that has "guidry" in it, yet Search doesn't find it. Is there way to change the default filename search to not look for a "match" but a "contains"?

Don't type anything in the upper right search box. Instead, just open a Finder Window (Maybe navigate this window to the device or folder you want to search if you don't want to search the whole Mac.) Now press CMD-F. You will get the menu that allows you to specify "Filename" and "Contains".

[James Steele]

Don't type anything in the upper right search box. Instead, just open a Finder Window (Maybe navigate this window to the device or folder you want to search if you don't want to search the whole Mac.) Now press CMD-F. You will get the menu that allows you to specify "Filename" and "Contains".

Right... that IS a Finder window. I did try doing Cmd-F and that gave me the criteria. Is there a way to change this default behavior though. Seems dumb as a box of rocks that the search field defaults to "MATCHES" instead of "CONTAINS." Who searches for files based on exact matches?!

So instead, I have to open the Finder window, do Cmd-F, change the "[Kind] is [Any]" line to "[Name] [contains] ______"

I can't just type part of the filename any more, I need to:

• Invoke Cmd-F
• Click "Kind" and select "Name" from the first popup menu.
• Click "matches" and select "contains" from the second popup menu
• FINALLY type in my search criteria.

Certainly there's a way to change this somewhere? Default Search settings or something. I don't every remember it functioning like this in OSes prior to Mavericks.

[bayswater]

Certainly there's a way to change this somewhere? Default Search settings or something. I don't every remember it functioning like this in OSes prior to Mavericks.

Not that I know of. There are probably edits that can be down to plists, terminal commands, etc. It certainly is frustrating. Apple has done a lot of stuff like this, probably to dumb things down so cater to the vast majority. Search started going downhill with Lion.

I've saved a few common searches as smart folders, and that helps a bit. They are somewhat editable in some circumstances. If you right click on them, you can show the saved criteria and modify them from there. Sometimes a little more convenient.

Also, Spotlight doesn't insist on an exact match, although it seems to require the start of a word rather than the middle.

[James Steele]

Also, Spotlight doesn't insist on an exact match, although it seems to require the start of a word rather than the middle.

Right. And this is what is bugging me about the filename search. I'll have to post a video of my email search problem. That's even worse. LOL

[Dan Worley]

James,

Finder > Preferences > Advanced > Search The Current Folder

Now when you do a search you can select "name matches *****" or "search everything" from a list right there in the window's little search field. You'll see.