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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

Is that a lisp config file? Blimey. Is this common in OSX land?

I'm somewhat skeptical that this will fix the random beachballing, because I'm pretty sure I've been seeing that since before ML. The fact that I put up with it is testimony to how badly windows and (desktop) linux suck.

EDIT: tried the config edit and rebooted, not seeing the "deny mach-lookup" error any more but I am still seeing regular "Unable to talk to lsboxd" messages. I guess I'll try the safemode thing later.

EDIT2: another thing I've done in my quest to banish the beachball is to uninstall iStat Menus. I'm sure there are many others here who use it. It was causing lots of crazy behaviour in the SystemUIServer process. Now I've binned it, things seem better. It's a shame, I liked those graphs. Anyone know another tool that can show me per-process bandwidth usage?

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All the sandbox entitlement files are written in that scheme-like syntax, but it's limited to that in OS X as far as I've seen.

It seems to be an actual Lisp-1 dialect, not just Scheme-like syntax. In (Lion's version of) application.sb, there are a whole bunch of lambdas and letrecs flying around. They even define a macro.

Interesting, I never really dug too deep into it, aside from making a couple of changes and standard entitlement stuff for applications. application.sb looks like a complete nightmare to maintain.

It's specifically TinyScheme, with one every-so-small modification to the parser.

This PDF goes into it in some detail: http://securityevaluators.com/files/papers/apple-sandbox.pdf

If you're running things like iStat Menus then you shouldn't be shocked when the system runs sluggish at times.

Is it really that unrealistic in 2013 to expect my machine to be able to update a few graphs once every couple of seconds without falling to its knees and weeping? I know it's having to make lots of calls into the kernel to get the data, and I can live with it taking up a little bit of CPU now and then, but I have a right to expect it not to hang the OS.

I guess the ugly UI of the thing should have been a warning.

I like their UI.

Ugly is probably too harsh, you're right. However I find that amount of fiddly extra chrome sets off alarm bells in my head. The config app gives me flashbacks of trying to delete norton utilities.

>Is it really that unrealistic in 2013 to expect my machine to be able to update a few graphs once every couple of seconds without falling to its knees and weeping?

It depends on how it's coded. And stat apps are notorious for using lots of resources.

Otherwise, a 2013 machine is a pretty tough beast performance wise, including running tons of highly demanding apps.

For people that know about DAWs, this video proves that the Retina MBP 15" is an absolute beast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgpLEIdVI3E

I run iStat Menus and have never noticed it cause even the slightest problem? I don't understand the problem?

The only thing that causes my MacBook to run slow is Dropbox when it does its re-indexing. 100% CPU, really? Sigh...

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