App Nap on Mavericks affecting PI?

[NGC7789]

When I saw this my first thought was could it also affect PI performance. We often run long running processes similar to a performance test without user interaction.

http://www.macperformanceguide.com/blog/2013/20140102_1-AppNap-slowdown.html

I haven't done any tests to confirm there's a benefit but I'm also guessing it can't hurt to prevent App Nap on PI.

-Josh

[Josh Lake]

This could explain a lot! We were having this issue with PI randomly crashing after waking up the computer. Perhaps App Nap plays a role.

[pfile]

the wake-from sleep crash is happening on Mountain Lion as well. i have not upgraded to Mavericks because app nap and related features really broke realtime applications (like equinox image). in fact it's so bad that he's not sure he can fix it!

anyway i found some more info about the crash and posted it in that thread. it really seems like there's some missing code (an exception handler) in PI, and it seems to be Qt related.

rob

[Juan Conejero]

This has nothing to do with that crash-after-sleep issue (which I'm investigating right now). And yes, the slowdown will also affect PixInsight severely during relatively long processes if the App Nap "feature" (?) is enabled.

[NGC7789]

Based on this article it looks like Power Nap is a bad idea too.At least Power Nap can be turned off globally in Energy Saver preferences whereas App Nap must be done one application at a time. All you laptop users should consider turning this off or at least know one place to look when you have performance or other issues on Mavericks.

http://www.zdnet.com/mac-mavericks-app-nap-power-nap-dont-always-play-well-with-others-7000024792/

[pfile]

i recently upgraded my iphone5 to ios7 and frankly i am astounded by the increase in battery life. in the relatively sandboxed application environment of iOS this aggressive power saving stuff really makes sense. but on a desktop OS… well they have gone too far, but probably for 95% of their users it's a win. if you just surf the web and use text editors all you see is much improved battery life.

rob

[NGC7789]

Yes. What bugs me most is not that they did it but that they make it so difficult to turn it off. And difficult to know that we may want to turn it off.