[iDriveX]

My PowerMac is starting to feel slow. Even typing in this text box is a little laggy. It wasn't like this when I first installed everything on it about a year ago. What type of command line stuff do you do to optimize your system? Any freeware tools that have worked for you? Inquiring minds want to know!

[baw]

format C: .. oh wait..

[Mister Elf]

What are the specs?

[SVass]

Safari saves favicons in a folder that should be emptied and write protected. sam

[iDriveX]

Oh yeah and Formatting the system isn't an option

Specs are:

PowerMac G4 Cube
1 Ghz PowerPC G4
NVidia GeForce3
120 GB Hard Drive
1.5 GB RAM
8x DVD-R
Airport
Bluetooth
23" Apple Cinema Display

I know the 1 Ghz Chip is slow for a system running 10.4, and I know that the 100 Mhz bus is going to slow everything down, but I also know that this system needs optimizing and I'm wondering what the best optimization tools are that you know of.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by iDriveX

My PowerMac is starting to feel slow. Even typing in this text box is a little laggy. It wasn't like this when I first installed everything on it about a year ago. What type of command line stuff do you do to optimize your system? Any freeware tools that have worked for you? Inquiring minds want to know!

You might wanna be more specific.

Is it slow in ALL apps, or in some more ?
Is it better when you reboot the system ?
Ever done the standard maintenance routines ? ( daily / weekly / omnthly cron run, repaired permissions etc...)

-t

[iDriveX]

Originally Posted by SVass

Safari saves favicons in a folder that should be emptied and write protected. sam

Done. Wow. That already made Safari faster. I would venture to guess that it loads pages about 100% faster and startup was 1 bounce instead of 5. Thanks for the tip!

[iDriveX]

Originally Posted by turtle777

You might wanna be more specific.

Is it slow in ALL apps, or in some more ?
Is it better when you reboot the system ?
Ever done the standard maintenance routines ? ( daily / weekly / omnthly cron run, repaired permissions etc...)

-t

It is slow in ALL apps and in the system
Rebooting really doesn't seem to help much. It's just a laggy sensation everywhere. There's a lot of hard drive access noise, almost like the hard drive is having to shuffle through a tremendous amount of BS all the time.
Never done standard maintenance routines because I heard the system does that for you. I leave it on 24/7.

[Mister Elf]

Restart. When the OS loads, repair permissions. Restart again, and it should be quite a bit snappier.

[ReggieX]

Post in the right forum?

[iDriveX]

Originally Posted by ReggieX

Post in the right forum?

Come on, don't be a douche, this is a general questions about what people do when their computers start getting slow. It could have been posted in any number of forums. It's not PowerMac specific, it's not software specific, and it's not hardware specific. If they wanted to make you a moderator, they would, until that time, make some productive comments around here.

[MindFad]

Originally Posted by ReggieX

Psot in the right forum?

Fxied.™

[Naplander]

Safari saves favicons in a folder that should be emptied and write protected. sam

Where is this folder stored?

[SVass]

Originally Posted by Naplander

Where is this folder stored?

Users/YOU/Library/Safari/ICONS

[E's Lil Theorem]

My Macs tend to not suffer from your problem, though I don't doubt you have it. My slow downs are typically caused by memory leaks in shady software along with me having my machine always on. A restart fixes that.

Originally Posted by iDriveX

.... If they wanted to make you a moderator, they would, until that time, make some productive comments around here.

Good stuff.

[iDriveX]

Originally Posted by E's Lil Theorem

My Macs tend to not suffer from your problem, though I don't doubt you have it. My slow downs are typically caused by memory leaks in shady software along with me having my machine always on. A restart fixes that.

Yeah I use BitTorrent quite a bit and I think it's got a memory leak or two, if I have more than 3 torrents active at any one time it nearly grinds my machine to a halt.

[dav]

Originally Posted by iDriveX

this system needs optimizing and I'm wondering what the best optimization tools are that you know of.

i've been using onyx for general os x tools (optimization, cache cleaning, etc.)

[Doofy]

Get a Brazilian supermodel to give you a back massage. Then you won't care how slow your system has become.

[Randman]

Safari Enhancer can deactivate the cache and turn off the flavicons.

If you have autofill on, go in and edit down the entries to less than 10. That helps very, very much.

Consider backing up and doing a clean install if dragginess persists.

[DanMacMan]

Originally Posted by dav

i've been using onyx for general os x tools (optimization, cache cleaning, etc.)

Get Macaroni. Its so much better than onyx visually and at what it does.

[dav]

Originally Posted by DanMacMan

Get Macaroni. Its so much better than onyx visually and at what it does.

how is macaroni better at what it does?

[CharlesS]

Suggestions brought forth already:

Repair Permissions - unlikely to do much.
Prebinding (Optimization) - unlikely to do anything since OS X keeps this up to date automatically since 10.2. Also, 10.4 doesn't even use prebinding much anymore, so this most likely won't help.

If your system has gradually slowed down, I dunno, probably a little cache cleaning or prefs trashing in the apps that are slow may help. Not the "cache cleaning" features mentioned in Onyx or whatever, though - I mean going through the Caches folder and deleting stuff for applications that are being slow (like Safari) manually. All Onyx will do will be to delete some common cache files like the LaunchServices cache, which most likely won't do much except screw up all your document-application binding settings.

[dickcheney]

I'm a casualty of the slow down as well...

I'm on a 2Ghz G5 with 2Gigs of ram, running tiger.

The machine is about 3 months old, and I transitioned directly to the machine from my laptop (g4 500mhz) using the tiger installer to keep all of my old files, settings etc.. Basically it turned my laptop into a firewire hard drive (held down the T key upon restart)

My question is... I've got a smokin' machine. But other people with the same machine outpreform me on simple tasks. I've tried some of the third party cache cleaners, but to no avail. My machine stays on quite a bit, but I give the machine a healthy restart every other day.

Any ideas on how to purge the spider webs from my system WITHOUT a complete rebuild of my files and system?

thanx.

DC

[Warrenpeace]

I've been doing Mac Support for Ad Agencies for 5 years now. Disk Warrior is the only thing I've ever needed to buy. TechTool doesn't fix the software issues, although the hardware tests are okay. Norton is just plain evil and should be avoided.

Run Cocktail regularly and Disk Warrior when you find things are messing up. Also, leaving your machine on. And make sure it has ventilation and clean the dust out of it regularly.

That's all a machine ever needs. Just make sure your Disk Warrior is up to date and don't try using an outdated version on your latest OS.

[Kenstee]

[QUOTE=dickcheney]I'm a casualty of the slow down as well...

I'm on a 2Ghz G5 with 2Gigs of ram, running tiger.

The machine is about 3 months old, and I transitioned directly to the machine from my laptop (g4 500mhz) using the tiger installer to keep all of my old files, settings etc.. Basically it turned my laptop into a firewire hard drive (held down the T key upon restart)

My question is... I've got a smokin' machine. But other people with the same machine outpreform me on simple tasks. I've tried some of the third party cache cleaners, but to no avail. My machine stays on quite a bit, but I give the machine a healthy restart every other day.

Any ideas on how to purge the spider webs from my system WITHOUT a complete rebuild of my files and system?/QUOTE]

Hate to say it but the direct transfer of your PB to your new machine may be the root cause of your problems. I repeat..MAY.

During the process you may have copied over corrupt preferences, settings, fonts. etc. all of which have the potential to produce the condition you are describing. In hindsight, it is better not to use the "T" technique or the new automated transfer solution provided by Apple as tempting as it is. I'd only transfer the USERS folder using this technique. Nothing else.

If you have followed ALL the instructions and recos on this thread with no success I think a clean system install AND clean re-install of all your apps, etc. may be the only way out of this. Sorry!

[DanMacMan]

Originally Posted by dav

how is macaroni better at what it does?

Perhaps not at what it does, but how it does. It gets put into the System Prefs, Set it and forget it. When I used Onyx, you had to run the program manually from the apps folder. I like having the utility do everything for me.

[reybart]

Originally Posted by SVass

Users/YOU/Library/Safari/ICONS

Thanks ! I emptied it and my safari became snappier.

[cc_foo]

I second the recommendation for Macaroni. It is a set-once and forget application, unlike some of the other similarish apps—Cocktail, Onyx.

Macaroni is reliable enough that I encourage its installation on every Mac which I may be asked to provide free tech support for.

I also like that it can automatically deletes extra language packs for new applications.

YMMV

Disclaimer: It’s been a while since I had to investigate these competing software, and they may have developed new features since then.

Disclaimer #2: I don’t actually know if these software speed up Macs. They do claim to do some background housekeeping

[cc_foo]

Originally Posted by Warrenpeace

I've been doing Mac Support for Ad Agencies for 5 years now. Disk Warrior is the only thing I've ever needed to buy. TechTool doesn't fix the software issues, although the hardware tests are okay. Norton is just plain evil and should be avoided.

Run Cocktail regularly and Disk Warrior when you find things are messing up. Also, leaving your machine on. And make sure it has ventilation and clean the dust out of it regularly.

That's all a machine ever needs. Just make sure your Disk Warrior is up to date and don't try using an outdated version on your latest OS.

Above emphasis mine. I agree 100%. IMHO Norton-anything is bad news, and should not be installed on any Mac OS X machine.

In terms of keeping a Mac running reliably for the general user, I would also recommend SuperDuper (or Carbon Copy Cloner), and an external harddisk.

[G5man]

Originally Posted by SVass

Safari saves favicons in a folder that should be emptied and write protected. sam

where is that ? should I search it in spotlight?

[reemas]

my system used to lag. pressing apple-option-eject puts it to sleep. well when it was slow, it would take about 20 - 30 seconds before it went to sleep. i have no idea why.

i just finished formatting and its back to snappy (although panther was 100% snappier).

now pressing those keys to make it sleep takes about 3 seconds everytime.

you have to re format, if not, you'll get some half ass fix.

[SVass]

Originally Posted by G5man

where is that ? should I search it in spotlight?

Users/YOU/Library/Safari/ICONS

[Simon]

Originally Posted by iDriveX

Yeah I use BitTorrent quite a bit and I think it's got a memory leak or two, if I have more than 3 torrents active at any one time it nearly grinds my machine to a halt.

I've seen that memory leak too.

However, there's a simple solution I discovered by chance. After you're done with BT, run Disk Utility and have it repair a volume or repair permissions on your boot volume. That way it will dump the leaked stuff out of memory first and you'll regain the wasted memory. Works fine every time I try it. You can verify it using Apple's Activity Monitor (look at 'System Memory') or by using Memory Monitor.

[iDriveX]

Well I broke down and did a System Erase and Fresh install. Took all day Saturday but it's smoking fast now. My advice for the future? Dedicate a day and do the install/restore.

[P]

Open Console (It's in /Applications/Utilities) and check the system.log and console.log to see if there are any odd warning messages. I found a lot of those when I upgraded to Tiger, all of which I fixed by updating various software. Helped a lot.

[nishkabob]

Don't know why this is happening, but I get an entry like this in my Console EVERY MINUTE!

Aug 28 14:22:40 martys-powerbook-g4-15 launchd: org.postfix.master: 9 more failures without living at least 60 seconds will cause job removal

How can I get rid of this? I don't recall enabling postfix, nor do I really know what it does or how to kill it...

Thanks!

nishkabob
15" AlBook 1.5ghz, Tiger 10.4.2

[jon l. dawson]

Originally Posted by Simon

I've seen that memory leak too.

However, there's a simple solution I discovered by chance. After you're done with BT, run Disk Utility and have it repair a volume or repair permissions on your boot volume. That way it will dump the leaked stuff out of memory first and you'll regain the wasted memory. Works fine every time I try it. You can verify it using Apple's Activity Monitor (look at 'System Memory') or by using Memory Monitor.

Or you could just go into Terminal and enter the command 'sync'

[Simon]

Ah, always wondered what part of DU did that. Thanks!