Turbocharge your Mac
- Article 12 of 53
- iCreate, November 2004
Suffer sluggish performance from your Mac no longer. This detailed feature will show you how to make your Mac run faster, how to streamline your OS for top performance and maximum disk space, and reveals some Unix trickery to make your system really fly.
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So if your Mac starts to feel a bit sluggish compared to when you first had it, you might want to start looking around to see what programs you typically have running and whether you need them. One of the best ways to do that is to use the Activity Monitor application in your Utilities folder, and set it to display “My processes”. If there are many more processes than you thought there would be, look into ways of disabling them, by uninstalling software you don’t need, or removing programs from your Startup Items (in the Accounts system preference pane) or from your StartupItems folder (in both your own Library folder and the main Library folder).
The other way to speed up your programs is to reschedule them. There are some programs that you leave running in the background that you might not want to get much share of the processor time and there are others that you might want to give more to. To change the priorities, you need to “re-nice” these programs.
“Re-nicing” is a reference to the Unix command “renice”, which allows you to change the priorities of your programs. Unix grew up in a time when all computers were multi-user systems and you had to pay for the time you used on a machine, so being able to dictate which programs got priority was quite important. It’s less important on a single-user Mac but the Unix legacy is still there for power-users.
Most Mac users don’t want to have to learn Unix though – probably rightly so – and there’s a small cottage industry growing up in developer circles of creating applications that provide simple, graphical way of performing Unix commands. Re-nicing – a single Unix command – already has at least four programs to manage it from a graphical interface, including BeNicer, Speed Freak, Prio and Renicer, and that’s pretty much a norm for some of the more useful Unix commands. Run any of these, pick which applications you want to give greater priority to and you should notice a speed improvement.
Surprisingly though, despite all those Intel adverts, it’s not the processor that’s the biggest bottleneck on most Macs. Memory and hard drive can exert more of an influence, and fortunately they’re far more easy to affect on a continuing basis than the processor.
If you bought a Mac and haven’t added any memory, get some more added now. It’s quite easy to do yourself if you follow the instructions, but there are plenty of Mac shops willing to add memory for a price. The base memory on most Macs is still lamentably low and the bare minimum should be at least 256MB, but 512MB to 1GB of RAM are far more palatable.
If you don’t have enough memory, OS X will start trying to juggle your applications around using some sophisticated compression techniques and eventually “virtual memory”. Virtual memory is a euphemism for great big files, known as a swap files, on your hard drive into which OS X will dump memory content when it doesn’t have enough space to keep it in memory. When it needs it back, it’ll read the data from the swap files into main memory again. The thing is, not only is your hard drive a lot slower than your memory, you’re also using your hard drive for storing files; if you’re constantly reading and writing files and constantly using the swap files, your Mac’s going to get very slow indeed as the hard drive reader jumps around reading and writing information from all the different locations on your hard drive.
So what can you do, other than add more memory, to solve this problem? If you have a lot (at least 1GB of memory, but preferably 2GB), you could think about turning off the swap files altogether, but since your Mac will freeze completely the very second you run out of free memory, that’s not a good idea for most people. (For advanced users only: It is possible by editing the file /etc/rc to remove the commands that activate the swap files). The other option is to move the swap file. If you’ve partitioned your hard drive (that is, split it up using Disk Utility so that it appears in the Finder as two or more separate disks), you could reconfigure the swap file to appear on a partition other than the one you have OS X installed upon. This will avoid any performance drops caused by disk fragmentation. However, the performance gains from this are slight since the swap file is still on the same hard drive and so the hard drive reader will still have to jump between the different areas to read and write to the swap file.
A better option is to move the swap file to a different hard drive altogether, if you have one, since your Mac will be able to read and write to both drives simultaneously. It’s possible to do this using standard Unix commands and a text editor, but a number of applications exist to do the hard work for you, such as Xupport, Swap Cop and Swap Relocator.
You’ll get similar performance gains for similar reasons if you move your Users directory to a separate drive. But unlike moving your swap file, no one has written a utility to automate the process, so you’ll need to use the Terminal.
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