“RE: Log Out! (Once Per Day)”

On 1/28/06, Nat Irons said:

>When you refer to cron tasks, do you mean something other than the
>daily, weekly, monthly scripts under /etc? Because those will
>absolutely fire while you're still logged in, as long as the machine's
>awake. Every so often I'll go looking for a reason that the fan in my
>powerbook is persistently spun up and I'll discover that the weekly
>task is rebuilding the locate database.

Nat,

The fact that you even know what cron tasks are proves that my post wasn't directed at you. The people who were complaining about stability problems in their software had installed dozens of firefox extensions, background apps, and were running copies of everything. One of them has a studio display, but his dock was as wide as the whole screen and was full of running applications (some of which he hadn't actually used in days).

These friends and family complain to me about things not working correctly, or being incredibly slow. I tell them to log out and back in again. Problem goes away for another week or two. Now I tell them to do it every day.

In other words, I'm talking strictly to regular users, people who don't know what app or extension is causing their problems, and don't care to put in the time to find out (or don't even know how). My message is to them is, "Log out once per day."

(Regarding the cron tasks specifically, though: it's already been pointed out that I was wrong about that. OS X will make sure they run later, if the computer isn't running at they time they were originally scheduled.)

Seth