Radiance under Mac OS X (Mavericks 10.9 and later)

radiance-general
1

If you are running Radiance under a recent edition of Mac OS X, you may want to selectively disable "App Nap", which is a feature that makes your process take longer because it thinks you're not "using it." See:

  https://www.howtogeek.com/277414/what-is-app-nap-is-it-slowing-down-my-mac-apps/

You can scroll down for how to disable App Nap for specific applications. I haven't experimented with it enough to be sure if it's sufficient to just disable it for the Terminal, or if you have to individually apply it to the Radiance renderers (if such a thing is possible), or if you need to do it system-wide. You may need to experiment, and please report back with what you found.

I'm still running Lion (10.7), because it's the *oldest* version of OS X my MacBook supports. So, I don't really know how big a problem this is, but I've noticed that background renders take forever under more recent versions. (Can't say I'm a fan of anything Apple has done in the last 5 years.)

Also check out a very useful command-line tool called "caffeinate", which I just heard about. It flags a process to keep the system from going to sleep while it's running.

Cheers,
-Greg

2

I tested this on 10.9.5:
Using a rtrace process running for 10 minutes as a benchmark, the run with
app nap disabled calculated the same general number of points as the run
where app nap kicked in after a minute or two.

Activity Monitor shows app nap in effect for terminal, but not any of its
child processes (bash, rtrace, etc), so it's possible it has no effect on
these, to be safe I will be leaving app nap disabled for terminal.

You cannot disable app nap for terminal per the instructions in the article
greg linked, so you need to either use the system wide command (in
terminal):

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

OR, to just disable for terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

to undo either of these replace YES with NO in the command. Global changes
requires a restart to take effect, terminal specific changes requires
quitting and reopening terminal.

Stephen Wasilewski
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···

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 2:05 PM, Gregory J. Ward <[email protected]> wrote:

If you are running Radiance under a recent edition of Mac OS X, you may
want to selectively disable "App Nap", which is a feature that makes your
process take longer because it thinks you're not "using it." See:

        https://www.howtogeek.com/277414/what-is-app-nap-is-it-
slowing-down-my-mac-apps/

You can scroll down for how to disable App Nap for specific applications.
I haven't experimented with it enough to be sure if it's sufficient to just
disable it for the Terminal, or if you have to individually apply it to the
Radiance renderers (if such a thing is possible), or if you need to do it
system-wide. You may need to experiment, and please report back with what
you found.

I'm still running Lion (10.7), because it's the *oldest* version of OS X
my MacBook supports. So, I don't really know how big a problem this is,
but I've noticed that background renders take forever under more recent
versions. (Can't say I'm a fan of anything Apple has done in the last 5
years.)

Also check out a very useful command-line tool called "caffeinate", which
I just heard about. It flags a process to keep the system from going to
sleep while it's running.

Cheers,
-Greg
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3

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for doing a little investigation of this. Sounds like it's not too big a problem, at least with the latest releases of OS X. I can't remember exactly when I noticed it was an issue -- it must have been 10.8, and they fixed it since then. Anyway, I was looking up some tips on speeding up Mac's and ran across this, so thought I would pass it along.

Cheers,
-Greg

···

From: Stephen Wasilewski <[email protected]>
Date: August 30, 2017 5:56:09 PM PDT

I tested this on 10.9.5:
Using a rtrace process running for 10 minutes as a benchmark, the run with app nap disabled calculated the same general number of points as the run where app nap kicked in after a minute or two.

Activity Monitor shows app nap in effect for terminal, but not any of its child processes (bash, rtrace, etc), so it's possible it has no effect on these, to be safe I will be leaving app nap disabled for terminal.

You cannot disable app nap for terminal per the instructions in the article greg linked, so you need to either use the system wide command (in terminal):

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

OR, to just disable for terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

to undo either of these replace YES with NO in the command. Global changes requires a restart to take effect, terminal specific changes requires quitting and reopening terminal.

Stephen Wasilewski
www.coolshadow.com

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 2:05 PM, Gregory J. Ward <[email protected]> wrote:
If you are running Radiance under a recent edition of Mac OS X, you may want to selectively disable "App Nap", which is a feature that makes your process take longer because it thinks you're not "using it." See:

        https://www.howtogeek.com/277414/what-is-app-nap-is-it-slowing-down-my-mac-apps/

You can scroll down for how to disable App Nap for specific applications. I haven't experimented with it enough to be sure if it's sufficient to just disable it for the Terminal, or if you have to individually apply it to the Radiance renderers (if such a thing is possible), or if you need to do it system-wide. You may need to experiment, and please report back with what you found.

I'm still running Lion (10.7), because it's the *oldest* version of OS X my MacBook supports. So, I don't really know how big a problem this is, but I've noticed that background renders take forever under more recent versions. (Can't say I'm a fan of anything Apple has done in the last 5 years.)

Also check out a very useful command-line tool called "caffeinate", which I just heard about. It flags a process to keep the system from going to sleep while it's running.

Cheers,
-Greg
________________________________