Here's the deal. I have a small wireless network with an iMac and a Mac mini. The Mac mini is running headless with OSXvnc.
The connection to the mini has worked fine on two out of two occassions (that I remember) shortly after a reboot of the mini.
On two out of two other occassions after the mini has been running along by itself for a long time, more than a week, it has been almost impossible to connect to it. The mini will respond to a "Chicken of the VNC" connection, to an ssh connection and to a Finder network drive logon, but it is slow as a glacier and can take up to two minutes to respond to any action.
I was able to log in through ssh, just now, and run top. With some patience I found that the cpu was mostly idle and when sorting by RSIZE I determined that no process was using more than 40MB of memory.
Strangely, some actions go a lot smoother. Right now I'm trying to log in using Chicken, it took several minutes for the mouse to respond and give me a password field and typing was impossible in the beginning, but got better after a couple of minutes. When it accepted my entry, it went to "checking password mode" and displayed a spinning progress bar. Strangely the spinning soon animated at almost full speed. Also, top did refresh quite smoothly once it got started.
This makes me believe that it isn't really a network problem, but more of a problem with Mac mini itself. The first thing that comes to mind is that disk swapping of virtual memory takes like forever. This could explain why some things start going smoothly once they get started.
Have anyone experienced something similar? Does anyone have any ideas on what to test or what to do to find the cause of the problem and/or how to fix it?
I'm still waiting for it to log me through vnc and have got the correct background image after wating 10 minutes.
I wanted to see Activity Monitor before I do a shutdown to see if it speeds up after a restart. Anything else I should try before I shut it down?
Edit: The iMac is running 10.4.2 and the mini is running 10.3. I'm not sure about the minor version number yet, but I think it is the most recent 10.3 revision.
The connection to the mini has worked fine on two out of two occassions (that I remember) shortly after a reboot of the mini.
On two out of two other occassions after the mini has been running along by itself for a long time, more than a week, it has been almost impossible to connect to it. The mini will respond to a "Chicken of the VNC" connection, to an ssh connection and to a Finder network drive logon, but it is slow as a glacier and can take up to two minutes to respond to any action.
I was able to log in through ssh, just now, and run top. With some patience I found that the cpu was mostly idle and when sorting by RSIZE I determined that no process was using more than 40MB of memory.
Strangely, some actions go a lot smoother. Right now I'm trying to log in using Chicken, it took several minutes for the mouse to respond and give me a password field and typing was impossible in the beginning, but got better after a couple of minutes. When it accepted my entry, it went to "checking password mode" and displayed a spinning progress bar. Strangely the spinning soon animated at almost full speed. Also, top did refresh quite smoothly once it got started.
This makes me believe that it isn't really a network problem, but more of a problem with Mac mini itself. The first thing that comes to mind is that disk swapping of virtual memory takes like forever. This could explain why some things start going smoothly once they get started.
Have anyone experienced something similar? Does anyone have any ideas on what to test or what to do to find the cause of the problem and/or how to fix it?
I'm still waiting for it to log me through vnc and have got the correct background image after wating 10 minutes.
I wanted to see Activity Monitor before I do a shutdown to see if it speeds up after a restart. Anything else I should try before I shut it down?
Edit: The iMac is running 10.4.2 and the mini is running 10.3. I'm not sure about the minor version number yet, but I think it is the most recent 10.3 revision.