In article <siegman-B1D603.12583804072008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
AES <siegman@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> When the Software Update window opens and says, "New Software is
> available for your computer", and the highlighted button says "Install 2
> Items", in many cases when I say Yes, the installation completes much
> more rapidly than these large items could possibly be downloaded on my
> slow "broadband" connection, so they must have been pre-downloaded.
>
> But is this _always_ the case?
>
> I'm looking at one of these alerts at the minute; I'd be willing to go
> off and do something else for a few minutes, while the installation
> takes place; but I also know our broadband connection is being fully
> saturated by another user, who'll be using it for quite a while. Should
> I risk starting the install?
Check out this setting:
System Preferences > Software Update > Download im****tant updates
automatically
Be careful with this function, though. I once had it enabled on a server
running Mac OS X 10.4. One day the server became so sluggish it was
barely accessible. I found that, for some unknown reason, just a few
kilobytes were available on the startup drive, and the system was in
utter swap hell because of it. The poor thing was thra****ng non-stop
just to stay alive.
After some painstaking investigation, I found the culprit: Software
Update had been re-downloading the same set of updates for days on end
without deleting the previously-downloaded copies! Eventually, it
completely filled the remaining available space, and brought the machine
to page-out hell - not good. From that point on, I made sure this
feature is disabled on all my production machhines - I just don't trust
it.
--
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JR
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