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XPC

Starting up in Sierra: a fuller account for troubleshooting

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A detailed examination of what happens during the first few minutes after starting your Mac up. Vital for anyone trying to diagnose problems in that period.

November 20, 2017 Macs, Technology

Reliability of macOS Sierra: scheduled and background activities

Scheduling background activities like making backups has moved from cron to launchd, and now to a more complex system. This has reduced the reliability of macOS and made it harder to support.

August 26, 2017 Macs, Technology

How macOS runs background activities: 4 Using XPC Activity

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How scheduling concurrent and background tasks using XPC Activity works, and compares with alternatives such as NSBackgroundActivityScheduler.

May 23, 2017 Macs, Technology

How macOS manages tasks on cores: a draft

Trying to get a more coherent overview of the different paths to concurrent, asynchronous, and background task management in macOS. Draft for discussion.

May 16, 2017 Macs, Technology

Watching Grand Central Dispatch at Work

The aim is to be able to run commands at regular intervals using GCD rather than launchd. Here are details of the code and resulting log entries, casting light on how GCD works.

May 1, 2017 Macs, Technology

App Nap, Battery Endurance, and Grand Central Dispatch

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Despite its documentation vanishing, it’s clear that GCD does a lot more than provide an easy way to concurrency for app developers.

April 29, 2017 Macs, Technology

Last Week on my Mac: Stories of gods and Grand Central Dispatch

Working out why Time Machine backups go wrong isn’t necessarily that different from unravelling classical mythology. In some ways.

February 12, 2017 Macs, Technology

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