A lot of Finder CPU has also been reported by some in the past when there was a corrupted custom icon or something else relating to the preview image.
See if it varies according to what folder you are in with Finder.

You should try the standard troubleshooting suggestions:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...04011205473937
http://forums.osxfaq.com/viewtopic.php?t=7269
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/faqs.html

In particular, be sure to try logging in as a different user to see if the problem exists there. (Create a new user via the Accounts preference panel if you only have the one user account so far.)

fragmentation still happens in today's OSes but its really rare to see a drive fragmented enough that it truly effects performance.

http://www.alsoft.com

Check out an app called disk optimizer. Back in the day it was bundled with disk warrior's earlier versions. Now, that diskwarrior has made its name with the maintance apps of macintosh, they charge seperately for it. Its good, I use it occasionally, but only usually after I am forced to upgrade a system over doing a clean install.

You could also have a memory leak somewhere causing issues, or an os update that requires some driver updates.

The possibilities for running slow are very broad. Heck a bad stick of ram could cause this, or it could be OS related.

I would start with the basics.

New user account
remove all third party hardware
check log files
reinstall apps
etc

See where that gets you.

actually it looks like that the optimizer and disk express software is actually still under development, so maybe check for it soon.

A reason to need to defragment?
 

I have a G4 iMac with burnt out FireWire ports and USB1, but not USB2.

I have DiskWarrior and CarbonCopyCloner.

It's not easy for me to back up to an external local volume, because the network is my fastest connection. I have plenty of free space on other partitions of the internal HD of the iMac, and I usually clone to there (using CCC) and then back up the clone on the network.

I'm preparing to reformat the HD, and I want to back up or clone the boot volume.

When I boot from the DiskWarrior CD, to rebuild the boot volume before cloning it, I get an error message that tells me I don't have 56MB (!!) of contiguous free space on the boot volume, and that I need that much space for a "no risk" (or some such phrase) rebuild of the directory. The boot volume has 1.5 GB of free space, about 25% of its total size, but, per DiskWarrior lacks 56MB of contiguous free space.

Any suggestions for how to get that free space to be there? Many posts say there's no need to defrag OS X, or that one defrags it by reformatting it, but I need to back up first.

PlusOptimizer by Alsoft is not for Tiger, according to their website.

(I don't understand asr well enough to use it from Terminal (I read the man pages, but I'm hindered by, for example, not knowing what multicast is, or how to prepare the volume that will receive the clone).)

Try rebooting (to free space in /private/var/vm/), then kick some stuff you don't need until it fits.

Or CCC, then run DW.

I had the same "slow down" occur and it was a prelude to my HD crapping out on me. In the beginning, it would boot up and power down in mere seconds, then after a while, it started taking longer, and longer, and many programs started slowing down as well. Finally, one day, it just slowed down to a complete stop and that was it.

Come to find out, I don't have SMS on my PBG4 1.5GHz so everytime i was moving my computer around, I was hurting the hard drive. Nice, huh?!?! Just be careful and try to back up if you can before things get out of hand.

Simply moving your computer around does no harm to your hard drive and SMS would have no effect on this anyway. It's designed to handle normal movement. Of course, you wouldn't want to drop your computer or toss it to a colleague wether it's running or not.

All SMS does is park the drive if a sever movement is sensed while the computer is running. This doesn't guaranty protection of the drive, but does reduce the risk if the computer is dropped. Any drive can be damaged with significant g-force even when off.

You can ignore that message. Unless you think the computer is going to crash on you in those few seconds that it takes to rebuild the directory.

I had ~12GB of space, but all the files were place everywhere on the that there was just small patches of free space instead of just one large chunk.

why is my new 250GB internal imac disc then fragmented at 28%
and i felt that in a loss of speed, compared to the high speed
of it 4 weeks ago. now its writing and writing when i book up
or do simple actions in the finder.......

i really wonder why it does not defragment itself.
everbody says "osx 10.4 does defragment itself" if neccessary.

bought the 24" imac 4 weeks ago.
worked with it heavily, using it as
a scratch disc for CS2 and 3. (is that bad?)
additionally writing big photo/movie/audio/files like 5 or 10 or even 30GB files to disc
and wipe it again after 3 days. doing that procedure weekly.

now techtool pro4 shows me 28% fragmentation.

should i use idefrag or is dataloss possible?
i dont have a backup in the moment.

thanks for help :)


screens here:

You should probably run software update a couple times, get up to 10.4.8 and all the various other updates out. Not that this will necessarily help your problem, but it's usually a good thing to stay up to date.

OS X does some defragmenting, and enough for most users. The applications you mentioned would be sensitive to fragmentation as well as cause some.

Those two pictures show measurements of different things (the right one is a reflection by DiskWarrior of the Directory, not of the drive itself).

There can be other reasons for the writing and slowing you mentioned. How much RAM do you have?

Yes - Adobe recommend placing the scratch disk on a different volume/partition from your system drive so as to reduce the problems you are experiencing.

i ve (only) 2GB of RAM

thanks i didnt know that i dont have to use the interal osx disc
as scratch disc for PS2 and PS3.

good news!

i will use my 500GB FW800 disc, its completely free of space.

what would you recommend me to do if i want to de-fragment my internal
disc next week, as it is 30% fragmented from photoshop's scratching actions, as shown in techtool pro 4.5.2

i could use iDefrag.
is that recommended?

or better useing Techtool pro 4.5.2 or better Disc Warrior 4?
some people said techtools defragmentation is worse than idefrag.

after defragm., how could i see if something is corrupt after de-fragmenting,
if iDefrag would do some harm to the disc files?

i made a screenshot with idefrag from the interal boot disc with/on same running system.
is that good or bad? i cannot read from the screenshot properly.
i wonder why it doesnt show fragmentation at 30%
as techtool shows 30% fragmentation.

http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p...n/10f893f2.png

any idea?

thanks

OK. OS X does defragment itself, but only files 20MB and smaller. You described using Photoshop scratch files, and "big photo/movie/audio/files like 5 or 10 or even 30GB." Well, those files are over 20MB, so they will not get defragmented by OS X. Therefore, you are correct to use another utility to defrag them.

However, there is a possible misinterpretation here. In the second screen shot, I see the text "Directory graph." I think that means the second graph doesn't show 28% fragmentation of the disk data. It shows 28% fragmentation of the disk directory. If iDefrag is looking at the disk data, not the directory, then of course it is a different number. If iDefrag shows low fragmentation, then your disk isn't fragmented. Only the directory, or the catalog that keeps track of all the files, is fragmented.

People run into this misunderstanding all the time with DiskWarrior, which only defrags and repairs disk directories, not the disk data itself.

P.S. The reason you are supposed to use an external drive for a scratch files (whether PHotoshop, Final Cut, audio, etc) is it must read and write heavily. If you keep the scratch files on your boot disk, it fights with your OS and application for use of the disk heads. If you put scratch on a different disk, the OS and app can have full use of one disk and the scratch operations can have full use of another disk, no more slowdowns due to fighting over access.

Thanks for insights on scratch files
 

Aha! Thanks, Bramley and Styrafome.

I've been using Photoshop for years without realizing why I should--or could--take advantage of scratch disk preferences (which I've now set).

As a newcomer to Amadeus Pro (which I will use to convert tapes and vinyl), I now understand that the preference on where to store "temporary files" allows me to make my boot volume more efficient when working with music.

On a partitioned hard drive, is there any reason why a volume other than the boot volume would not work as well as an external drive for scratch files?

Respectfully, Norm

A partitioned HD still uses one disk, and will probably suffer the same slowdowns as the boot disk. (if you boot from the same disk)

Is there an advantage to isolating just the boot files (basically the OS and any other necessary files) on a seperate volume when you're only using a single HDD? I'm referring to using a MBP with a single 60GB HDD.

Yes. Separating your user files from the OS/Applications gives you two separate filesystems, which means two separate directories, which means if the OS volume fails your user data is untouched. If your user directory fails you have a working os to try recovery. If you have to bite the bullet and send it to a recovery company the data is physically isolated and thus easier to recover. (they can ignore the OS partition)

Statistically, a directory will get corrupted every n writes. The OS temp and swap areas get the most writes*. The OS is also the easiest to recover if it fails - just pop in the install cds.

* You can increase this ratio even more if the user cache folders are redirected.

Can anyone recommend how to go about doing this? My assumption is I would need to remove everything from the HDD to an external HDD, clean sweep the MBP's HDD and partition it with a 2GB (is that enough?) sector for the OS files, then reinstall OS 10.4 in the small partition, and copy back all my other data to the large partition. Any problems with this?