Mach OS X

• Article 53 of 53
• iCreate, March 2006
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1.6MB

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It gets harder after this, since you have identify which programs you want to kill off. The best way to approach the problem is to quit all the programs you’re using except for Activity Monitor. You can then use that to work out for yourself what you’re running and quit anything you know you don’t want. A quick scan through might reveal for instance that you’re running “ipfwloggerd”. If you just happen to know that stands for “IP firewall logger daemon”, all well and good – either kill it off or go into your “Firewall” preferences and turn off Firewall logging. But if you don’t know what it does, leave it alone.

Once you’re done, work your way through the System Preferences, going through each option in turn and asking yourself the following question: “Does this option make my Mac do more work?” Does it take any more effort for the Mac to run using French menus? No. To use Californian time instead of London? No. Does it take effort to display an icon, such as the time or AirPort status, in the menubar? Yes. Does it take effort to log things? Yes. Once you’ve identified something that takes effort, decide whether you need to use it; if you don’t, turn it off.

Controls for third-party programs such as Default Folder, Version Cue, and Stuffit Deluxe will often appear here and you can use them to configure whether these programs or some of their extra features should run or not.

Pay very close attention to the Login items pane of the Accounts section. When your Mac logs you in, it will run all the programs listed here. If there’s something you’ve installed but don’t want any more, delete it from the list to prevent it launching at start up.

There are two other ways for items to launch themselves at start-up in Tiger. The first uses special files designed to work with launchd itself. These are located in the “Library” folders under “LaunchAgents” and “LaunchDaemons”. If you want to find out what they do, use Lingon (free, http://lingon.sourceforge.net/) to analyse the commands each file gives launchd.

The second way, a left over from Panther and earlier, is the “StartupItems” folder in the main “Library” folder. This contains items designed to run programs and Unix commands at start-up. Usually, they have descriptive titles, making it easy for you to know what they launch and whether you want them: common, self-explanatory items include “AdobeVersionCueCS2”, “RetroRun” (used by Retrospect), and “MissingSyncMounting”, although there are many others. If they look redundant, simply drag them to the Trash to stop them running next time you start up.

There are two major Tiger functions that hog memory, processor time and hard drive access: these are Dashboard and Spotlight. You’ll find your Mac will often slow down considerably soon after you’ve launched Dashboard for the first time. If you look at Activity Monitor, you’ll see the reason why. Even with Dashboard out the way, its widgets still run and each will typically consume about 8MB of memory and some CPU time as well. The more powerful widgets, such as radio players and others that load Internet plug-ins, can consume twice that, easily. Pruning down the number of widgets you use can speed up Tiger. If you like your widgets the way they are, though, use Activity Monitor or the Terminal command “killall Dock” to quit the Dock, which is the “parent” of all the Dashboard widgets when you’re done. The Dock will restart afterwards but Dashboard won’t until the next time you launch it.

Spotlight is another resource-hogger. As well as taking up processing time, it accesses the hard drive almost continuously, reading updated documents and adding them to its index. Spotlight can’t deal with databases of files, only individual files, and it only understands a limited number of file formats. Throw it a Microsoft Entourage database, a FileMaker Pro file or anything else that’s large and gets updated frequently and it will constantly try to process that database in its entirety each and every time.

You can stop Spotlight being such a menace by restricting which files it indexes or turning it off completely. The first option is easier, since you only need use the “Privacy” tab in the Spotlight System Preferences pane. Just drag folders to which you never add data onto the pane and Spotlight will stop indexing them. Similarly, dragging your “Microsoft User Data” folder, which you can find in your “Documents” folder, will stop Entourage’s database from getting a thorough going over.

Turning off Spotlight altogether is not without its hazards. All sorts of Tiger programs rely on Spotlight for the find functions, including Mail. But if you’re sure you want to, the shareware program Spotless ($7.95, http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/) gives you a graphical way to manage or deactivate Spotlight (see walkthrough three).

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