Whats the best way improve os x 10.5 performance
 

Im new to macs,

Other than disabling spotlight and adding max ram.What can i do,Or disable/delete to improve the performance on my macbook.


I have the black macbook with 4 gigs of ram and 160 gigs hard drive with 2.2 ghz processor.

maybe new hard drive as well?

What would be the best one over 200Gigs?


Thanks alot!!!

You question does not describe the situation where you need to improve the performance. You Mac is rather top notch and should run everything great.
If you need to upgrade HDD get 7200rpm one. But I have doubts that you notice any improvement.
I have MBP for live video work and I have pretty much everything thrown out except OS and Modul8. When going live I disable network as well. So there is nothing that tries to upgrade. When I do something else I boot from external eSATA or Firewire drive. Works really well.

Are you experiencing performance problems? This question is vague.

sorry for the vague question guys.

In windows you can disable a bunch of programs, like error reporting,remote desktop, and numerous others so you don't have a bunch of programs that you don't use eating up some performance.

I like to disable or delete any program that slow anything down.

Hope that's less vague...

Thanks


Derik

Well, you're in luck, Apple doesn't run much of anything in the background. The only programs that might run in the background are daemons that you installed. If you want to check for those, go to "Accounts" in the preferences menu and check the "login items" tab. Make sure all the programs that are listed are ones that you use.

Other than that, just make sure you completely shut down programs you're done using.

Also, if you're not using Airport or Bluetooth, turn them off...helps with battery life as well.

Edit: Ah, just thought of one more major thing. Grab the widget "stop dashboard". Dashboard can be a RAM hog if you have started it up (Dashboard is still holding up RAM when you've left it). The "stop dashboard" widget resets Dashboard and frees the RAM. Of course, it also means that Dashboard takes more time to load the next time you use it...but if you really need the speed, it helps.

You can open your Activity Monitor utility, check the list of running processes, and identify ones you don't want to run. But note that at any given time, 80% of the processes are using no CPU time, so it might be more trouble and time to micromanage this than to let OS X do it for you. You would have to know what the processes do. For example, you wouldn't want to kill Loginwindow because that would immediately terminate your session without saving changes. You can often Google process names to find out what they're about.

I'm just gonna quote myself, I guess:

Sorry,

No but Ive just bought it but I do run quite a few applications at once.

I want to make sure I get the max performance out of this mac without being robbed some of my performance like the pc's do.

I did check in my activity monitor and every program thats there I use.


Were is the stop dashboard widget?

Like Mikey said.

If you are some sort of Power User Graphic Artist or Editor etc. then (I am only guessing at your specefic problem since you have not told us yet) that you might need a Desktop Hard Drive. While there is quite a range of performance and prices for Latpop drives desktop ones put them to shame in speed and size (though laptop ones just hit 500 vs. 1tb).

Heavy Duty Art, Editing etc requre Desktop drives or even drive arays. Lastly as you own consumer book you do not have a dedicated video card with its own VRAM. If you were doing this sort of stuff I mention though you probably would have reached for an 8 core desktop.

Pause for a moment and think:

If you aren't having performance problems, why are you wasting your time and energy tweaking? Maybe you should wait to go through a bunch of tweaking crap until you actually feel that something is slower than it should be. At that point, we can investigate what is causing that specific performance issue, and recommend a course of action that applies.

Until then, stop worrying and simply enjoy the machine.

You're VERY well equipped. A few extra standard OS processes are not going to drag on a dual-core 2.2 GHz. At this point, making your Mac faster is not about time-wasting tweakage, it's about removing bottlenecks.

So what bottlenecks could you have? Not RAM, you have the maximum installed. You asked about a bigger hard drive, but that won't make anything faster unless you're low on free space. If you want faster, and you have a 5400RPM drive, then swap in a 7200RPM drive instead. Bigger drives are rarely faster; some higher capacities are only available at 5400RPM and not 7200RPM.

But that's about it. The best use of your time right now is to enjoy the machine, not tinker with it as if it was a PC. Your machine, the way you've configured it, will spend much more time waiting for you, than you will spend waiting for it.

Since swiftly searching the HD for text & file information is apparently unimportant,
then... for which application(s) will this Mac be most used, which is (are) important?

Games?

Somehow, I just don't feel Spotlight is slowing me down one bit.
[sure, the first hour in an upgraded account has indexing, but...]

--

I'd recommend a DiskWarrior "directory optimization" maybe monthly,
but even that's probably overdoing it.

-HI-

I thought that you were all about maximizing performance and efficiency. What good is a fast machine if you do everything the old-fashioned manual way? Spotlight allows you to rapidly launch applications, open documents, do quick calculations and look up dictionary definitions all with a couple of keystrokes and all without needing to know where on the hard drive anything lives. Why would you want to sacrifice your own efficiency and performance by going about it the manual way?

As a general rule, for a near empty drive, spindle speed affects drive speed the most. However, with 180 GB of data, a 320GB 5400 RPM drive will most likely outperform a 200GB 7200 RPM drive.

Personally, I have opted for a 200 GB 7200 rpm drive in my MacBook.

What brand and were did you get you HD?

It's the Hitachi Travelstar model that features SATA 150 (as opposed to the model that features SATA 300). IIRC, the MacBook does not support SATA 300. I can't remember where I purchased the drive. It was pretty new at the time, and is more widely available now. I've seen prices around the $100 mark, but around $200 seems more common.

Manufacturer's product page

Listen, I am running Leopard on a 733mhz G4, with 1GB of ram, and a 128GB HD. Even I haven't disabled spotlight. Do you have a specific need to disable a fantastic feature? What next? Kill the finder and use terminal because it uses less ram? I think not.

As for dashboard, I sometimes close it myself to save RAM, but it doesn't consume any processing power while in the background, so you really should think twice since you have (an AMPLE) 4GB.

There are widgets that fully close dashboard. Try http://www.natal.be/index.php/2005/1...hboard-widget/

What's wrong with this guy wanting to get max performance out of his MB? It doesn't have to be for a specific reason, or to address a specific concern. I'm with you Volitan

No, there's nothing wrong with wanting to pursue the best performance from your Mac. Some of the responses here have asked about specific performance issues that can be resolved in other ways, without disabling (probably unnecessarily) system core processes. A faster system at the expense of stability, or even usability, leaves you with less than what you had. OS X typically gets the best performance by providing enough RAM memory, and perhaps doing some routine tasks to keep the hard drive and file system working to its optimum. Most software in OS X does not 'lay in ambush', or clog up your system resources like you may encounter in Windows. Lots of memory, and a good amount of free space on the hard drive normally results in the best performance, depending on your use.

The StopDashboard widget works really well. I only use iStat + weather widgets, but I find no loss of functionality using StopDashboard. It doesn't really take any longer to open Dashboard when you need it too.

Great link!

I'm with those who are asking what performance you want.

You have a machine with much more power than (say) mine, but I am good with what I can do with it.

The tweaks you look for are much more specific to the tasks you want to do since the OS footprint is a lot smaller than the one you comparing it to and are feeling the need to pear/pare it down.

So... what do you want to make sure you can give the most performance to? That will get you the answer you seek.

It's really simple to get max performance. Hold down command-S while booting! That gets all of the frivolous eye candy out of the way of your productivity. ;)

Just remember "S" for speed!

I'm new to Macs as well
 

I just purchased a new 2 GHz Core 2 Duo macbook in February. I installed a HITACHI 200GB HD and 4GB of RAM a few days ago and installed all the updates for the various bundled software. I have yet to do anything but play chess, set prefs, use activity monitor and explore the OS.

1: Is it normal after a clean install to have 1GB of RAM utilization and 10% processor utilization with the occational 60% jump when playing chess while sys prefs, activity monitor and dictionary are open?

Thank you.

Chabig,
What does command s do exactly?


"It's really simple to get max performance. Hold down command-S while booting! That gets all of the frivolous eye candy out of the way of your productivity.

Just remember "S" for speed!"


Thanks

Brilliant!

In that case, the *first* thing to do is disconnect your Mac from the Internet.
Just yank out the ethernet cable. [There's nothing worse than being networked
to slow down a perfectly good computer].

What do you mean by "1 GB of RAM utilization" ? You mean the "Used" number under Activity Monitor's "system memory" tab? Don't bother with that - OS X tries to use as much RAM as possible for caching disk files etc. So it is normal (and good!) to have almost almost all of your RAM in use.

And of course a chess program is often quite CPU intensive, so CPU usage spikes are to be expected.

Booting with Command-S held down takes you into "single-user mode".
This is not useful except for troubleshooting.

You should realize that people are just offering joking suggestions since you haven't responded to questions about what specifically you want to optimize for.

(OS X is already optimized for what Apple considers to be the most likely usage - so you need to explain why your usage will be different from the usual.)

Wow Some of you are really cocky!!

For F@#!! sakes All I wanted to know is what i can do to get an overall better performance on my mac......Whats with all the stupid comments.I never said I had performance problems in any area.I just want to have the max performance in any area of my computer...I guess this is the last time i ever post on this site.

We're very helpful and friendly here. But you've asked a question that has no answer. The Mac is not like Windows. You always get the overall best performance.

Mine was a perfectly rational suggestion,
given that the first "advice" you advocated
to readers here was to disable Spotlight.

:cool:

"overall better performance" for what???
What is it you are you trying to do lad?

[do you even know?]

That's not true. There are all kinds of ways the Mac can slow down. Hundreds of Mac forum threads are dedicated to troubleshooting this. That's like saying "Macs don't crash," because when one inevitably does somewhere, everyone gets to say that Mac users are liars.

A more accurate reason the Mac performs well out of the box is because it doesn't come with a lot of OEM adware/software that is installed and set to run by default thanks to marketing contracts. In Mac OS X, stuff only runs that's supposed to run, and you add things later. Spotlight is installed and running by default because the user performance benefit of having it run FAR outweighs the performance cost to the CPU. It's not like a background reminder that came with your Windows computer that asks you every day to sign up for an free 30-day AOL or RealNetworks account.

The only solution for a vagely defined "overall best performance" is the suggestion to start up with Command-S, which removes what many consider to be the largest unnecessary drain on system resources in a modern computer: The 3D, shadowed, animated graphical user interface, and the abstraction layers that get between the hardware and the user. By reducing the display to simple characters, hardware burdens are removed and optimal performance is assured.

There are a few things that I do to keep my Mac running smoothly. The first is to keep at least 10% of disk space free. This is probably the most important tip. It also helps to disable any unused widgets, or just disable dashboard all together. Also, disable any unneeded start up items. Lastly, I've found that defragmenting every 6 months can help performance if you move a lot of large files around. Here's a full article on how to optimize Mac OS X.

Dunno if you'll ever read this but for anybody else reading:

To be honest there's little you can do. Mac OS X is a rock solid system and when I did the same research after optimizing the hell out of an XP install I couldn't really find anything useful. On good hardware with a lot of RAM even the best advice I can give you still isn't going to make much of a difference in responsiveness, although your system will still use fewer resources, even that will still be marginal depending on how many of Apple's marketed features you disable or just don't touch. The most annoying thing will be paging, don't worry too much about CPU utilization, and the way to avoid paging is to have more RAM to start with (and an SSD to back it up won't hurt either).

But here's the best advice I can give: disable anything you won't use or don't need to use, don't enable anything you're not planning to use, kill some annoying daemons consuming about 20 MB of RAM (that's 20 MB that can go to something you ARE using without having to page, but Google to see which ones are actually safe to kill, like blued), and only run apps you're currently using, and only leave apps open that you are actually going to get back to later. Seriously, it's boring that there's not much you can do to improve performance out of the box, but at the same time Mac OS X is rock solid because of it.

Oh and one last thing: do not use VileFault (more commonly known as FileVault). I don't know what you use your computer for and I'm not curious either, but if you have something that you need to protect, just stuff it in an HFS+ formatted disk image with 256 bit AES encryption (go to /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app and poke around to find out how), but nothing will slow down your system like VileFault will with the exception of maybe browser plug-ins or almost any app made by Adobe, and it's a pain to disable.

I think the point several people have attempted to make in this thread is that to do useful optimization there needs to be a particular objective in mind, because the answer will be different for different objectives.

With no particular objective, you're pretty much at the level of trial and error, and can subjectively evaluate the result of trying various things. If it feels faster to you, that would be meeting your non-objective objective. :)

Aside from the time taken to initially build Spotlight's metadatabase, is there any performance benefit attained by disabling Spotlight?

Both spotlight and fseventsd can get into times when they're
crunching away rebuilding tables, so getting them out of the way
may be a performance win for some situations. If you depend on
certain types of fast indexing being available [time machine,
spotlight searches, etc] then that's obviously not going to help.

I found in my ongoing process of ripping the OS down to the basics
that you can't really "google for which daemons to disable".
I've been trying to find more info on that for months, and mostly
building my own table through trial and error. But keeping good
notes on the process, so if I had to do it again it would be fast.

Obviously if I choose to disable things like CUPS and ntpd and
stuff you'd expect to work if you want your clock dead-on or be
able to print, that's not going to help. But for a generic
boot-the-box, get-on-the-net, surf, play with pictures and sound
files, etc then leaner and meaner is probably better.

If you run "activity monitor" and it shows plenty of free memory
and almost no CPU being used, then you're well on the way and
you may not need to change anything.

_H*

Spotlight when its indexing at the beginning and subsequent does take cpu cycles....

Disabling it of course makes it harder and slower to find things you need later. Most people search their drives pretty often looking for an errant misplaced item.

hello, I'm a newbie with Mac *4 days now* as well but completely understand where volitan is coming from and where he wants to go, he is so used to Windows that it is a tweaking necessity but I can say that no tweaking needed for My Macbook, I'm glad I dropped the 1400$, this 2.4ghz speed with 4gb-ram is very fast and smooth. I know what keeps others away from Mac and that happens to be $$$$ but we are a breed of our own!

some good tools to use would be:

-MainMenu for Maintenance Scripts, Disabling Dashboard, Cache Cleaning, Repairing Permissions, etc.

-Onyx/Tinker Tool - Tweaking OS X with some hidden features (basically a GUI front end for a lot of terminal commands, some of which are simply not useful)

-aand you might want to try Monolingual.

it clears out all the languages you don't want on your cpu - and effectively removes around 200MB of ridiculous languages you've never even heard of :D


also... removing a lot of the superflous graphic effects from OS X can improve performance.


or if you use a program like quicksilver, you can be more productive... thus increasing performance by not wasting time to find and then launch apps!

Replace the hard drive with a good Solid State Disk.

Latest iMacs have between 320 GIGAbytes and 1 TERAbyte of hard disk space. MacBook starts at 160 GIGAbytes. So you might save 200 MEGAbytes - Yay! That's between 1/5000th and 1/800th of your hard drive! There's also a risk that you might removal something useful or even necessary.

Also, you don't need to repair permissions on a regular basis. They don't rust. Do it if you have a problem, but that's it.

Where are you getting 200 MB from?

Looking at iTunes 8.1.1 alone, i stripped out everything except English and Swedish: iTunes.app before = 122 MB... iTunes.app after = 55 MB. So that's 67 MB saved on iTunes.app *alone* (plus, i kept a second language). Someone stripping all non-English from the entire HD stands to recover somewhere between 500 megs and a full gig i'd wager.

But consider backups too. Time Machine is dutifully preserving past versions (iTunes 7.0, iTunes 7.0.2, iTunes 7.1, iTunes 7.1.2, iTunes 8.0, iTunes 8.0.1, iTunes 8.1, etc.) So get out your calculator and start multiplying... because you're backing up a ton of useless $#!+.

And also consider: it's not just "size" that matters... there's also all the extra files that the disk directory needs to account for. How many tens of thousands (if not almost a hundred thousand) extra files must be continuously catalogued and kept track of? For what?

Maybe it's no big deal... but i wouldn't berate anyone who says dumping useless localizations can improve performance. (Certainly backup times can be reduced, simply by virtue of backing up less useless $#!+).

--

<rant> Installer.app (and Pacifist) should have options in their prefs whereby we users can predetermine which localizations we want written to disk. </rant>

For some perspective, my MacBook Pro came with 10.4, but I've upgraded it to 10.5, so it's got an older version of the paid iLife applications. Note, too, that I deleted GarageBand and all its ancillary files. I have, though, stripped out all non-English languages. My /Applications, /Library and /System folder are less than 10 GB when only adding up the Apple files. I could get that down to about 7 GB and 200,000 total files if I deleted all the print drivers I don't use. Both the number of files and disk space saved is significant.

Is there a system performance gain? I have no idea because I strip the system of languages and extra files immediately (speech voices, Apple desktop pictures, screen savers, etc.), so I don't have a baseline for reference.

Hal Itosis: If the rumors are true, 10.6 will provide greater control of the installed languages. It never made sense to me that the OS installer lets the user choose the installed languages but Apple updates don't have this option.

From the previous poster whom I quoted. I doubt they meant 200 Gb of saving.

I agree that Apple ought to make getting rid of non-used localizations easier. The first thing I do with a new install is remove all the non-Roman typefaces. Probably doesn't save much disk space, but does make the font menu a little cleaner.

I have heard some horror stories with some of the software that removes localization removing other stuff as well - so I'm reluctant to do it until I'm down to my last few gigs.

What's the best way to improve ox x 10.5 performance?

Unless one has a MacPro and can RAID 0 a couple of 10,000 RPM drives or install a series of SSD drives and RAID 0 those, cloning the OS from a single drive/SSD, plus pump up the RAM and install a fast video card, the ability to substantially (or really noticeably) increase a Mac's performance is minimal.

It's mostly all in the speed of accessing data on the hard drive that makes a huge appearance in OS X speed, and for any OS for that matter.

(There is a YouTube video with 64 SSD RAID 0 on Windows, incredible speed)

A few tweaks here and there can be done, but nothing really noticeable. (Keep your hard drive below 50%, max the RAM, buy the better machine to begin with)

So with most Macs, what you see is what you get.

It's wise to buy the higher end machines (MacBook Pro/Mac Pro) if you plan on keeping the computer for 4 years or longer. These (in my opinion) seem to uphold their performance "feel" longer without a noticeable drag like seen on the lower end models (MacBook, Mac Mini, iMac).

However there are bigger iMacs now that may still have the "build to order" online option of getting a faster video card. I highly recommend it if you plan on keeping the machine for four years or more.

Naturally the longer one keeps their machine, the lower it's annual cost to own is.

OS speed tweaks are minimal, I believe Apple limits the redraw speed as give a consistent appearance and to show off eye candy, instead of snapping everything on screen like I know they can based upon earlier OS versions (OS 9) I've used.

As far as I know there are no methods, like on Windows, to decrease the OS X quality to improve the redraw speed.

There is a speed tweak for Safari, using Safari Speed will eliminate the one second delay for page redraws and other things to improve it's speed a bit.

Apple makes it's OS to appear drool worthy, compared to the dull, often jagged, unpolished Windows appearance. It's what sells computers, OS X.