[deebee]

Hi,

I have been enjoying my Dual 2.0 G5 with Panther for several months but have noticed that in time it has slowed down. The overall responsiveness has dropped, especially at logon - the menu bar takes ages to appear.

I am very selective as to what apps are installed and have performed regular updates of the system as and when they appear.

What is the best method of optimisation or am I better off waiting for 10.3.3 then reinstalling the OS and updating in a one-er to avoid clogging up with updates and files?

Any help would be gratefully appraciated.

[gorickey]

The 10.3.1 update and again in the 10.3.2 update slowed down the boot process by quite a bit...it's nothing you have done...hopefully 10.3.3 will restore the speed...

[Andrew Stephens]

My collegue and I both use Panther all day everyday on our G4 1GHz machines. As busy designers we are switching between Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark and a half dozen other apps all the time. We both notice that by mid afternoon performance under Panther has dropped off by a good 30/40% with the spinning beachball appearing more and more frequently.

We generally have to restart the machines by this point just to restore some semblence of efficiency. This never seemed to happen under 10.2. Couldn't comment on slowing down on my TiBook as it never seems to stay up that long between kernal panics - also Panther.

My guess would be that memory management under Panther is not all it is cracked up to be!

[deebee]

Thanks for the replies.

I performed a unix hack to speed up the logon speed but it is the overall slugishness that bothers me.

It seems that over time with application installations and updates, the system has bogged down somehow. Getting this into perspective, it's not as though it's painfully slow but just that is not as zippy as it was!

I was under the impression that the methods that Mac OS X handles applications was leaner than the horrid .dll abonation that is cash-cow-soft! I notice that certain directories "receipts" have swelled with files and was hoping there may be some form of system optimiser that deleted unnecessary files.

Perhaps a reinstall it is then...

[ryju]

Originally posted by gorickey:
The 10.3.1 update and again in the 10.3.2 update slowed down the boot process by quite a bit...it's nothing you have done...hopefully 10.3.3 will restore the speed...

There is a command you can input into the terminal to fix this... I'm FAR too lazy to look for it though. Good luck!

[suthercd]

Open the Activity Monitor located in the Utilities folder and see what processes are using your resources. You can also monitor your RAM usage and see if there is a prblem caused by needing mre RAm.

Why would you restart rather than log out then log in?

Craig

[asmack]

Type this into the terminal:

sudo ln -s /System/Library/Extensions/BootCache.kext/Contents/Resources/BootCacheControl /usr/sbin/BootCacheControl

Then restart twice. It may or may not help reduce the reboot time...

[bergy]

To keep your computer humming ... I recommend running these now and for future use.


Macaroni ... just set it and forget it. ONLY utility of its kind to work AUTOMATICALLY
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9633

Macaroni is a tool which handles regular maintenance for Mac OS X's Unix core. Normally these tasks run on a regular schedule, in the middle of the night. However if you don't leave your Mac on all night, they never run. Your Mac won't wake from sleep to handle this. Macaroni solves this problem. If a scheduled maintenance task is not run when it's normally scheduled, Macaroni automatically ensures that it's run at the next opportunity, whenever the Mac is on. Repairs permissions also, on a weekly basis.

Also every month or so ....
Cache Out X
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9538
Cache Out X clears out the cache entries on your machine, helping you recover valuable disk space on your machine. Items removed include the caches in System, Users, and Library, along with the Internet Explorer download cache. Optionally clears the IE's history cache as well.

Most importantly ... buy a copy of "Disk Warrior" and run it every couple of months.

[Gavin]

I'm guessing there is some new caching thing that's not quite right.

I've got a ibook with a gig free and after running a lot of apps all day I start getting low space errors - it eats almost a gig in just caching.
it gets much worse if another account is logged in even if they are running no aps.

logging everybody out fixes it.