[Mike the Knife]

Well, not so much official, but you catch my drift.

I've been running on this installation of 10.2 since September. Not that long, I know, but I've installed a lot of stuff and I've even *gasp* run System Optimizer X on my machine.

I've noticed that lately my system has been running pretty slow, so I ask you all this:

Save for a reformat, what are the best tips and tricks to increasing system performance? What's the best disk defragmentation program? Best ways to free up space?

[malvolio]

The best defragmenter (IMHO) is PlusOptimizer from Alsoft, the creators of DiskWarrior. It comes on the DiskWarrior CD. An OS X-native version was previewed at MWSF, and is due to be released within the next few weeks.
Whenever you do decide to reformat, consider creating a dedicated swapfile partition. This helps avoid future disk fragmentation.

[Don Pickett]

Make sure ya always use premium unleaded. The cheap stuff'll get you every time.

[Axo1ot1]

I have read in a number of places that defragmenting post-jaguar macs is totally unnecessary. Get more ram and a faster video card. What model are you running. If you don't have AGP get PCI Extreme! from versiontracker.

[Parky]

Have you let the machine run it's regular overnight cleanup processes ?

You need to leave it running (not in sleep) overnight for a week to make sure the jobs run.

You can do this yourself if you download some software called MacJanitor.

It runs the Daily, Weekly and Monthly jobs on demand.

Ian

[willed]

Originally posted by Parky:
Have you let the machine run it's regular overnight cleanup processes ?

You need to leave it running (not in sleep) overnight for a week to make sure the jobs run.

You can do this yourself if you download some software called MacJanitor.

It runs the Daily, Weekly and Monthly jobs on demand.

Ian

Eh? What are these cleanup processes? Why would Apple make them work only if you left your computer on continuously for a week??

[ZackS]

Apple didn't make them, they're a part of most *nix installations, which are meant to be left on 24/7.

[RealMadrid]

For me it helped to repair disk permissions (which I needed to do to get Apache working) with disk utility booting from the install disk.

... perhaps it also was the placebo effect because of the slowlieness of the system on that CD.

Anyway I felt it faster and that was nice.

Regards.

[becca]

Try booting in single user mode (command s at startup) and running file system check.
fsck -y

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by willed:
Eh? What are these cleanup processes? Why would Apple make them work only if you left your computer on continuously for a week??

They are done via the sudo command. You can run them at any time by typing

Code:
sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

Those commands run the daily, weekly and monthly cleanup jobs, respectively. If you're feeling brave you can edit the file etc/crontab to change the times.

There is also an app called, I think, Macjanitor, which will do this for you. Check Versiontracker.

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Originally posted by Parky:


You can do this yourself if you download some software called MacJanitor.

It runs the Daily, Weekly and Monthly jobs on demand.

Ian

Ok I just ran this for the first time ever and it cleaned up a whooping 100k of disk space.

THANK GOD I AM SO ANAL WITH THESE THINGS!

[CheesePuff]

Originally posted by Disgruntled Head of C-3PO:
Ok I just ran this for the first time ever and it cleaned up a whooping 100k of disk space.

THANK GOD I AM SO ANAL WITH THESE THINGS!

What you should have done is looked at how much free RAM you had before and after.

I go from 10 MB free to 350 MB in 1 minute (the weekly job does this).

[clarkgoble]

If your system seems to mysteriously be slowing down of late, the obvious first step is to check to see what software you have running. A lot of times small little system tweaks you've forgotten about are slowing things down. Check your login files. Then think of what programs are running. Process Viewer is your friends but it can't find all problems.

I discovered my culprit was Direct Connect. It had what are called memory leaks. While OSX was protecting the system from crashing the way Sys9 would have, it was still affecting it. I tracked this down by rebooting and finding that my system was at full speed until I ran DC. Even after quiting DC the system wasn't as fast as it should have been.

Other culprits that can do this are Mail, Suitcase, Word, and other things. While OSX is very efficient at multitasking, quiting unneeded apps still can subtly improve system performance. Especially for applications that are primarily ports of older Sys9 programs. There are difference in how applications poll for interaction. Some aren't that efficient in how they do it.

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Originally posted by CheesePuff:
What you should have done is looked at how much free RAM you had before and after.

I go from 10 MB free to 350 MB in 1 minute (the weekly job does this).

I have to restart every week one way or another so that clears it up.

[GoldenHammer]

I am going to reinstall my entire OSX environment, I have an initial plan as follows. Comments?

Five Partitons:

1. OSX 10.2.3
2. Swap
3. OS 9
4. Applications
5. Personal Data

[webb3201]

Originally posted by CheesePuff:
What you should have done is looked at how much free RAM you had before and after.

I go from 10 MB free to 350 MB in 1 minute (the weekly job does this).

wow, I had never watched the memory stats during the cleanup....from 69m free to 435m free in one minute.

Thanks, much

[Miniryu]

I ran the optimizer than comes with DiskWarrior (I just bought it, I don't remember the name a the moment). It told me that my directory is fragmented and that it could not be fixed. How did this happen? Is there any way to undo it? What are the effects I will notice?

[Fallout]

Originally posted by GoldenHammer:
I am going to reinstall my entire OSX environment, I have an initial plan as follows. Comments?

Five Partitons:

1. OSX 10.2.3
2. Swap
3. OS 9
4. Applications
5. Personal Data

There's no point to having 5 partitions. Just have one for OSX, and one for OS9. Use the OSX partition for your apps and personal data, and the OS9 one for backup and swap. Also, it's a huge pain in the ass to get OSX to actually recognize the partitions the way you want them. (apps folder on a different partition, home folder on another)

[euphras]

Quote:
"I have to restart every week one way or another so that clears it up."

To my knowledge restarting does not get you rid of the logfiles and so on that are deleted by Macjanitor (or by the core if the machine runs overnight)

Pat

PS: I love the word "core"

[Coxy]

HFS+ disks rarely, if ever, require defragmentation. I, personally, have *never* defragged a HFS or HFS+ disk.

Of course, if you routinely create and delete hundreds of little files, then disregard the above advice, YMMV!

[chabig]

Regarding an increase in free memory...this is probably not as good a thing as you think.

There is nothing in the weekly script that necessarily does anything to free up memory. Remember, the Mac has virtual memory. What is probably happening is this:

1. You have pages of memory that are in use.
2. When you run the weekly script it starts several command line tasks that require computer resources.
3. In order to allow those to run efficiently, the OS pages some memory to disk (virtual memory).
4. When those tasks finish, those pages in memory are marked as free.

So you "have" increased your free memory, BUT at the cost of a small hit in performance, because next time the machine requires the data that was paged out in step 3, it will have to retrieve that data from the hard drive rather having it available in memory.

So don't get excited about see an increase in free RAM after running one of these scripts. Rather, be sorry to see your data get paged out to disk. Better still, don't worry about RAM, just let the system manage it the way it's supposed to.

Chris

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Originally posted by euphras:
Quote:
"I have to restart every week one way or another so that clears it up."

To my knowledge restarting does not get you rid of the logfiles and so on that are deleted by Macjanitor (or by the core if the machine runs overnight)

I was talking about the RAM.

[Simon]

OMG. WTH can't people stop looking at their free RAM?

Hello people, wake up, we're not in OS 9 anymore. This is now the system's job.

It makes me go crazy that people think they have to force their system to free up RAM.

May I explain a few things about memory in UNIX systems? OK:

- The system has a very smart way of managing RAM and VM. It "knows" how to keep stuff, but also, when to throw out what if more memory space is needed.

- It is an absoluetly WRONG idea that a lot of free memory is a good thing. A really GOOD thing is to have the system cache stuff in VM so that it doesn't have to fetch it from disk (slow!) when it's needed again. If your running processes have enough memory then you don't need more free memory. You want as much left there as possible in case you need it again later.

- The only time when you need to clear out stuff is when the running processes need more memory. But UNIX systems do that on their own. It's absolutely ridiculous that users think they have to force the system to do certain things. The system is smarter than the user.

- That said, the important thing to watch is the number of page-ins/page-outs. This is actually something that shows you if the system has to kick stuff out to get necessary stuff in or if it has to get stuff in that it would have liked to have there already.

- What you really HAVE TO DO is buy enough memory so that in everyday work you don't get many page-ins/page-outs. This is the system's requirement to do efficient handling of memory. This is why you need more than 128MB RAM - it's just not enough for all these running processes. Normal work will make OS X suck if you only have 128MB RAM.

- Once you have done this, leave the damn thing alone. It really knows best how to handle memory. Really, it does.

- If somebody thinks a process with a memory leak contradicts this strategy it's not true. sudo periodic weekly won't help you with that leak either. What does help is to quit (or kill) the process with the mem leak. The system will regain the leaked mem by itself when it needs it.

Guys, really, this isn't 9 anymore. You don't need to fiddle with it. There are so many people saying OS X can't do this or that and 9 is better in this or that, but damn, at least let OS X alone when it does those things it does better. Memory management is one of them. Be happy that you don't have to worry about it. And please for the love of all Macs stop the damn discussion about how to force the system into managing mem. IT'S NOT NECESSARY.

That said, daily, weekly and monthly do really necessary stuff and they're good tools. But running weekly every other hour because of memory is just ridiculous and ignorant noob stuff.

OK, rant over.

[chabig]

Simon, well said.

[sniffer]

In my experience a reformat and fresh reinstall doesn't give you much speed increase, if any.
Your changes are normally stored in your home directory, and X mostly starts up only those services needed. On the other hand, as mentioned in an earlier post, bad apps can slow down your system.