Turbocharge your Mac

• Article 12 of 53
• iCreate, November 2004
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1MB

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Remember the first time you saw a Mac running OS X? Wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it amazing to see a computer that didn’t make you want to head for the toilet with a nauseous feeling in your stomach?

Most people would be more than content to have computer that didn’t make them think they’d been wearing beer-goggles when they’d bought it. But what few Mac owners realise is that the 10 they picked up at the local electronics boutique pretty much has the equivalent of a doctorate in astrophysics, an in-depth knowledge of the works of Shakespeare and a fascination with pre-Columbian art. There are many layers to a Mac.

Beneath all the eye-candy, there is a whole lot going on in OS X. At its heart is something called Unix, which is a computer expert’s system of choice. Worked on over decades, Unix is very powerful and has thousands of tools and applications written for it. Even more importantly, it’s very customisable and the power user can usually just edit a text file or add a few items to a command to make Unix do exactly what he or she wants it to do. The trouble is Unix is also very complicated. For one thing, by default, there’s not really any graphical way of using it – you just have to memorise whole series of arcane commands, just as if you were learning a foreign language. And instead of there being a logical, consistent way of doing things, almost every element of Unix has its own way of doing things that’s very much dependent on the original programmers that designed it 30 years ago.

So, when Apple decided to build OS X using a Unix core, Steve Jobs and his associates knew that the computer for “the rest of us” couldn’t really expose “the rest of us” to the full-on Unix experience without “the rest of us” running away in horror. They hid it, simply letting the eye-candy do all the heavy lifting for us. Unix is still there, it’s just we don’t have to worry about it.

There’s always a trade off, however, between simplicity and power in the computer world. Sure, the OS X interface with its collection of utilities and system preferences can configure parts of the Unix core. But it can’t configure all of them, since there would be literally hundreds of different choices to pick from and no novice user would be able to use a Mac. For power users, though, this can be frustrating since they often want to be able to change the way a Mac runs in a way that Steve and co didn’t think was necessary, suitable for the general Mac-using population or which they didn’t think of at all. Fortunately, there are still ways to get to the Unix underneath to make your Mac go faster, remove bits you don’t want and run in the way you want it to. And that’s what we’re going to show you in this article.

There are, essentially, four big bottlenecks in your Mac’s performance: its processor, its hard drive, its memory and its interface. The processor (or processors in some Macs) makes all the calculations necessary for programs to do their jobs, so the faster the processor, the faster the programs go. There’s not much you can do to make your processor go faster: while you can upgrade some Macs with better processors, most of the time you have to stick with what you’ve got. But there is some room for performance improvements here.

The processor doesn’t do everything at once. In conjunction with a part of OS X called the “kernel”, it schedules tasks, determining how many times per second it will perform calculations for each program. So, there are two ways of cranking more performance out of your processor: run fewer programs or give a higher priority to the programs you care about.

Running fewer programs may seem an obvious way of speeding things to most people; after all, having full-screen movies playing at the same time as you’re running Virtual PC, Photoshop and Word generally brings most Macs to their knees and once you’ve tried something like that once, you rarely try it again. But there are a whole load of programs you may not realise are programs at all since they don’t show up in the Dock. These include the various “daemons” that manage things like Printer Sharing, Personal Web Sharing, Windows Sharing and so on. Some of these sit in memory the whole time, while others wait until a “master daemon” (on earlier versions of OS X, it was the “inetd” daemon but Jaguar and Panther use the “xinetd” daemon) spots a request for your printer, files, et al and launches the appropriate daemon. Even when these daemons aren’t actually doing anything, the processor still donates some of its time to them so they can work out what to do with their lives.

Similarly, the menu bar icons for things like AirPort signal strength, sound, iChat, Bluetooth, and battery charge all take up a little bit of extra processing power.

And that’s just on a standard OS X installation. Once you start installing other programs, the daemons start to proliferate, particularly if you’ve installed System Preference panels, do things at specific times, or intercede for specific actions: back-up software Retrospect has a daemon to tell it when to launch; Norton Utilities and Norton Anti-Virus have a massed army of daemons to scan for disks being launched, files being used, files being thrown out, et al; and Stuffit Deluxe has daemons for it its Archive Via Rename tool, its “magic menu” and its Archive Assistant.

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