[Pythonmac-SIG] Trying to track down a bug in BitTorrent for Mac OS 9

[Phil]

Hi, Benjamin, and thanks for your reply!

>But could something be blocking the IO requests?  Or locking the queue
>that the requests are in?
>
>Since Mac OS 9 is co-operatively multitasking, something else that is
>running, including the OS, could be starving the OS 9 Bittorrent client
>for Cycles...

I do notice that the problem tends to get even worse when BT is running in
the background (though 2.3.3 seems to have mitigated that somewhat).
Actually, BT runs terribly in the background in general -- if I don't keep
it in the foreground during a transfer, it loses a lot of upload/download
speed and eventually drops the connection completely.

>Try opening the Bittorrent client, and quiting *everything* else, including
>the finder and see if there is any change.
>The easiest way to quit the finder, and everything else is to whip up a
>applescript that opens bittorrent, and then closes everything else..
>The pity is that I had a applescript like that for another application,
>but I don't have it available now....

I actually have one around that just goes "tell application finder / quit /
end tell", which comes in handy on occasion.  (Specifically:  for some
reason, after I burn a CD, sometimes the Finder goes down under a rash of
-110 errors, and I have to force-quit the finder, so sometimes I just
preemptively quit and reactivate it.)

But alas, this didn't help either:  quitting the Finder didn't result in
any appreciable increase in speed.  To me, that strongly suggests that the
bottleneck _isn't_ any kind of processor overload, since quitting the
Finder in Mac OS 9 consistently boosts the speed in applications where the
CPU is getting maxed out (Virtual PC, for instance).

The hunt continues!  Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Phil