home ‣ Drobo Dashboard and mysterious mac slowdowns login
I have a mac pro (early 2008 model) running OS X 10.6 and recently it has been plagued with mysterious slowdowns: after a couple of hours it would develop a huge latency when responding to mouse clicks.
For example it would take literally seconds to show menu after clicking on a menu bar or switch to an application after clicking its window. Not an experience I would expect from 8 core machine with 12GB of RAM.
A reboot would fix it but only for a few hours. After several days of frustration I figured out the problem: Drobo Dashboard 1.6.1 was the culprit.
There are two solutions.
One is to kill DDServiced process when the slowdown starts happening (sudo killall -9 DDServiced). It’ll restart itself so things will keep working and the slowdown will be gone for several hours.
Another one is to uninstall Drobo Dashboard (at least until Drobo fixes their software) following those instructions. Drobo runs just fine without the dashboard and its usefulness is lost on me.
I found a few twitter mentions about this problem. According to this tweet upcoming 1.6.6 release will fix this problem.