Controlling and Invoking Sleep and Hibernate on Mac OS X

[somnialcat]

Since 10.4, Mac OS X defaults to "Safe Sleep" mode when it puts the system to sleep, meaning that it writes out all memory to disk (hibernate+sleep). The power light doesn't begin pulsing until after the data is safely written out, and thereafter the system can lose power and still wake up to the saved state successfully. This is a great safety

Comments

[shatterstripes]

I use the Deep Sleep widget on my machine. Works pretty well.

It's also worth noting that since switching to Snow Leopard, waking from hibernation takes a lot longer - there's a delay of several impatient seconds before the wake-from-sleep progress bar shows up. At least for me.

[somnialcat]

InsomniaX has my favorite UI, but the Secure Virtual Memory problem is a non-starter for me. I've been using the Hibernation Tool for Mac OS on my iMac and it hasn't had any problems, even when using Secure Virtual Memory. I tried installing the Deep Sleep widget and it complained about not being in the root Library folder, so I deleted it. :P

How have you found Snow Leopard overall? I hear it's supposed to be faster, especially in the Finder, and more stable. The new feature of showing all of an application's windows with Expose when an icon is clicked (and held) in the dock appeals to me, but I'm not sure I'd spend $30 on it.

[shatterstripes]

I don't think I've really used any SL-specific features at all yet - none of the Expose changes fit my hidden-dock keyboard-and-tablet usage. Oh, wait, I do like being able to sort column views by something other than alphabetized order.

Eventually perhaps something I use will take advantage of the awesomeness of Grand Central Dispatch and I'll be happy to have upgraded, but I really haven't noticed any change in my day-by-day use. My Leopard system was pretty stable already, so no real changes there. The main thing I've really noticed is that, well, waking from hibernation is slower to bring up a UI.

$30 for 64-bitness and some frameworks with awesome possibilities was worth it for me.

[somnialcat]

Ooh, I'd really like to see something like GCD on Linux to manage dispatch of parallelizable threads from different processes without oversaturating resources. Seems to me it could have the biggest advantage in situations where you've got multiple multithreaded resource-intensive apps running simultaneously. It could make app consolidation on servers much more efficient than adding a layer of virtualization to manage resource allocation dynamically.