disable ethernet?

[Tonio]

So does having the ethernet always on use up CPU or hamper the use of DP?

Are you guys with internet and DP on the same computer disabling the ethernet?

[qo]

As long as traffic is not being sent/received, there is no reason to disable the ethernet. One thing that you may want to do is disable any services that would result in unpredictable traffic e.g. the apache web server. But, it's really inconvenient to disable the ethernet since e.g. you can setup date/time to automatically update to Apple's (or your ISP's) NTP server (a very lightweight process that shouldn't impact your DAW at all).

The other area to look out for is whether you are on a shared LAN where a lot of broadcast packets are present. Broadcasts (at the L2/ethernet layer) are packets who's destination address is ffff.ffff.ffff. An ethernet NIC MUST accept broadcast frames (which will, in turn, result in a CPU interrupt), but can filter unicast frames that are not destined to it's burned-in mac address and can filter most multicast frames.

So, bottom line, no need to disable ethernet if you:

1. Ensure that any services are disabled that would interfere with your DAW

2. Ensure that you are on a "quiet" LAN.

[qo]

Also, in Terminal, a couple commands that might be of use in determining general traffic levels are:

ifconfig | grep RX
netstat -s

To see exactly what packets are being sent received:

tcpdump

To see only broadcast packets received:

tcpdump ether dst ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

The above work on Linux, and _should_ also work on OSX, but e.g. the -s flag may be something else with OSX's netstat, and ifconfig may not output capital RX with it's interface receive counts (I'm not at a mac to check at the moment). So, the following are your friends:

man ifconfig
man netstat
man tcpdump

[Tonio]

whoa Go, thanks for the detailed replies!!
I'm fine on the former issue, but may have to look into the latter a bit more.

I bring this up, due to a crash a experienced last night. DP froze-locked up the whole comp., rebooted. Upon recovery boot I get a message across the screen (with desktop still intact)with black background & white font -something to the effect of a kernal exception or something or other. With some verbage about ethernet.

T

<small>[ July 06, 2005, 04:47 PM: Message edited by: Tonio ]</small>

[pinky]

Originally posted by Tonio:
Upon recovery boot I get a message across the screen (with desktop still intact)with black background & white font -something to the effect of a kernal exception or something or other. With some verbage about ethernet.

T

That is a kernal panic (the same as a system crash in OS 9 or eralier). Go to MacHelp and search for craash reporting.In short, quoting from help:

"You can view crash logs in Console, located in /Applications/Utilities. In the Logs list, user application crashes are located in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and system application crashes are located in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter."

It saves (to my understanding) the state of your Mac at the crash. This would include network info. So I would doubt that your ethernet connection caused the crash. But if it did, you could track it down this way (but you do need to know a bit about the OS.)

[Tonio]

pinky, I thought when a message saying you need to
restart your computer blah blah blah- was a kernel panic? Must be two types.
Rather new to OSX, so I almost freaked-at least I wasn't loosing any data. I did check out the consol crash reporter- that thing is really hard to read.

Off to OSX audio-oops its down, guess I'll head over to Apple. After cleaning up some demo plugs

[pinky]

Originally posted by Tonio:
[QB]pinky, I thought when a message saying you need to
restart your computer blah blah blah- was a kernel panic?

Sounded like what you described.

[bongo_x]

I made a "location" in "Network" control panel called "Off" and turned everything off. then I just switch to it from the apple menu.

Billy

[sdemott]

Actually - the ethernet port will be polled ( every nnn miliseconds, I forget the exact value) for trafic or connections (using up CPU cycles) as long as it is enabled. Turn off all unused network ports to free up extra CPU cycles for your DAW.

I too create an "Off" location and disable all network interfaces when in my DAW account.

HTH