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.