Hey all,
So this has been bugging me since Lion, but I've always thought it might simply be normal behaviour so never thought to ask.
Back in the Snow Leopard days, after logging in and you're taken to the desktop, the computer is immediately responsive and hard drive activity immediately dies down within seconds, making the system immediately responsive to inputs and commands.
Since Lion, after arriving at the desktop, I've noticed that it takes at least another minute or so for the computer to actually settle down and be usable after the desktop appears. Since I have a disc activity monitor on the menu bar, I can see that the disc is really doing lots of reads and writes for the first minute or so before it finally stops and things become snappy and responsive.
Now, my only possible conclusion is that in Lion and above (Mavericks included), it may be caching lots of files to memory to help speed things up after. Is that the case or could there be another reason? Anyone else with a traditional spinning drive that has noticed this too? (I specify this because on my Air with an SSD, it's pretty much ready and snappy as soon as desktop appears)
So this has been bugging me since Lion, but I've always thought it might simply be normal behaviour so never thought to ask.
Back in the Snow Leopard days, after logging in and you're taken to the desktop, the computer is immediately responsive and hard drive activity immediately dies down within seconds, making the system immediately responsive to inputs and commands.
Since Lion, after arriving at the desktop, I've noticed that it takes at least another minute or so for the computer to actually settle down and be usable after the desktop appears. Since I have a disc activity monitor on the menu bar, I can see that the disc is really doing lots of reads and writes for the first minute or so before it finally stops and things become snappy and responsive.
Now, my only possible conclusion is that in Lion and above (Mavericks included), it may be caching lots of files to memory to help speed things up after. Is that the case or could there be another reason? Anyone else with a traditional spinning drive that has noticed this too? (I specify this because on my Air with an SSD, it's pretty much ready and snappy as soon as desktop appears)