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May 15, 2007

troubleshooting

Breaking down 52 ways to speed up your Mac

Posted May. 15, ’07, 5:45 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Troubleshooting

imafish It looks like I may have to make debunking Mac speed tips a regular feature. I already criticized a list of 11 things, finding a large portion that were really not helping. With a list of 52, I’m going to be doing a lot of typing. Follow me down the extended section for the smackdown.

  1. Repair Disk Permissions. Please just stop. It’s not a cure all.
  2. Clear out login items. Yes, unused login items can use memory and CPU, but this effect can be overstated.
  3. Clear out unwanted applications. Reminder: this is only going to save you disk space. If you’re not running low, this isn’t going to have a speed effect. This reminder will be back.
  4. Clear out unused system preferences. Yup, some resources can be used by System Preference panes.
  5. Clear Desktop. To quote the article, “Its been reported numerous times that having a clear desktop can increase the speed of your Mac. So either put your junk in folders or delete it!” This underlines a problem with this article. Understanding why these things helps is important. Each icon on the desktop is represented as a window in OS X, sucking up memory if you have a lot.
  6. Empty Trash. See #3.
  7. Turn off Universal Access (if not used). These are off by default, most don’t incur any resource usage until invoked and some software relies on “Enable access for assistive devices”. Turning this open off without knowing this could be rather frustrating when stuff breaks.
  8. Turn off Bluetooth (if not used). Not really going to save you anything (because unless Apple is completely inept, it’s interrupt driven).
  9. Turn off speech recognition (if not used). Sure.
  10. Turn off internet sharing (if not used). Again, something off by default and shouldn’t be left on without proper administration as it may be a security risk (which is the bigger issue).
  11. Check there is plenty of disk space on the boot drive. Hence #3.
  12. Remove Unwanted Language Packs. #3. Again.
  13. Remove any desktop changing programs. Any software has the potential for wasting resources.
  14. Check dock for unwanted apps. This is going to save you an unimportant amount of memory. See #5.
  15. Choose suitable applications for files. This isn’t going to speed up your Mac. It’s choosing the right tool for the job.
  16. Check Software Build. Yes, yes, yes. Use Universal binaries if you have an Intel Mac. Why this was relevant to the described situation (person using a G5) is beyond me.
  17. Remove dock animation. Wastes a tiny amount of resources only while launching apps. Not a big savings.
  18. Avoid animated desktops. Yes, resources are used during transitions.
  19. Remove unused widgets. Good tip. Hopefully this changes in Leopard.
  20. Check to see how much processing power and memory each widget uses. Really a repeat of 19, but using Activity Monitor is a good way to identify errant software. See #13.
  21. Remove animation effects. Not going to save you a lot because the Tinkertool options don’t save anything except when those actions are happening.
  22. Disable Dock shadow. Negligible savings, almost to the point of nill on even halfway recent Macs.
  23. Disable Dashboard. See #19.
  24. Skip checksum verifications when opening DMG files. Oh, brilliant. Now you can introduce corrupted files into your filesystem. That’s especially great for software. Not.
  25. Remove or deactivate unwanted login items from the Login Items pane. This is #2. Now we’re outright repeating.
  26. Reduce delay time for display of loading pages in Safari. Does absolutely nothing. See #5.
  27. Un-tick Graphic Effects (Finder tab). Stop. These are the same options in Tinkertool (21-26). No more repeating.
  28. Un-tick Animate ‘Opening applications’ and ‘When alert in background’ (Dock tab). See #17 (another dupe) and the latter removes a useful feature.
  29. Disable Dashboard (Dashboard and Expose tab). See #23. Stop repeating. Many tools can do a bunch of these tips.
  30. Set Safari speed of web page display to fast (Safari Tab). See #26. Useless.
  31. Repair Disk Permissions. This is #1.
  32. * Run Maintenance Scripts.* These get run overnight regularly. Tiger will run them on reboot if it’s been missed and they do little other than compress log files.
  33. Reset Spotlight Index (it may take over a day to rebuild the index afterwards). If it’s corrupt and choking, this may help.
  34. Run complete system optimization. This is updating prebinding. Doing it manually for speed savings is completely unnecessary as the prebinding will be updated as apps are launched (a one time time loss). This can even be dangerous when run twice in parallel.
  35. Clear Internet Settings. Some of these can help Safari. Clearing caches can also incur some time loss (as the point of caches is making some data more convenient and faster).
  36. Clear User and Font Caches. See #35 for effect of cache deletion. However, corrupt or bloated caches can be an issue.
  37. Clear unused logs. See #3.
  38. Force Empty Trash. See #6. Also note this does nothing unless the trash refuses to empty.
  39. Check settings. Finds corrupt plist files (preferences). Corruption in these files is more likely to cause crashes than slowdowns.
  40. Clear Cache. See #35.
  41. Clear History. See #35.
  42. Clear AutoFill. See #35. That said, Safari does get sluggish when this has too many entries.
  43. Clear Favicons. See #35. This does help at times.
  44. If you use Firefox then you can get specially optimized versions of the browser based on your processor architecture - either G4, G5 or intel. Based on using some compiler switches. Won’t monotonically improve speed.
  45. Extensions. Many of these will slow Firefox.
  46. Smart Playlists. Resource usage of these is completely overstated. And not using them will waste your time as you manually manage them (and it’s not going to slow down any tasks except launching iTunes).
  47. HP Printer drivers can often cause problems and use a lot of processor power so check in the activity monitor for HP Communicator. See #13 and #20.
  48. Check Classic is not running if not being used. Yes, Classic sucks up memory. This goes to #16, using the software right for your machine and OS.
  49. Run Software Update. Always good advice. Unlikely to give you any speed savings.
  50. Update other applications. Sure, but be careful of regressions.
  51. Add More RAM. Computers love RAM.
  52. Reboot your Mac. Generally helps by restarting all your processes. Despite developers best efforts, some applications will leak memory. Safari is probably the most notorious for this (as is WebKit, which is used in many applications).

Anyway, some of these aren’t bad ideas. However, most are repeats and many only affect disk usage.


27 Comments

Jesse Hogue said:

Just to clarify, there are some repeats in the list, but the way you present it here isnt fair. If you look at the list itself, he groups things by programs, kinda telling the reader how to run certain things within the program. So yes its a repeat in general, but its related to the program they are giving tips about.

May 15, 2007 6:21 AM
Nathan Skone said:

Number 11 is in fact valid. If the hard drive running Mac OS X doesn't have enough free space for caching and virtual memory, bad things can happen, including slowdowns.

May 15, 2007 1:15 PM
Reikiwes said:

Jesse,

If that is the case, then there really are NOT 52 ways to speed up your Mac. There are REALLY only 16 ways to speed up your Mac, compiled in 5 different applications that all do the same thing.

May 15, 2007 3:34 PM
Rob, the Mac Man said:

51 should be more specific.
Not only computers love RAM, but Intel iMacs and MacBooks have dual channel capability and always make sure you have both slots filled with the same type of RAM. If you don't plan to upgrade to Max RAM, instead of 1x1G, choose 2x512M option. Believe me, my iMac is now much faster.

May 15, 2007 6:39 PM
KnowledgeSeeker said:

#8 - Bluetooth. It DOES impact the battery life - if you had it on (especially in discoverable mode, which is on by default) - for macbook/pro owners.

May 16, 2007 4:03 AM
James Hammett said:

Having a full disk will slow the system.

Although not speed related*, turning off bluetooth may help battery life. (Also if you know you don't need wireless, you can turn it off as well).

*Except the speed that your battery drains.

Another hint:
If you turn on "Caclulate Folder Size" in the Finder, it will slow your machine down

For Desktops, you probably want to leave it on all of the time, this way the nightly optimization/maintentnance scripts will get a chance to run.

May 16, 2007 4:34 AM
Raquel said:

The article says emptying the trash doesn't help with speed, but if you have an older mac with a small hard drive the more free space you have the more virtual memory you can accommodate, thus a faster mac.

May 16, 2007 4:43 AM
Derik said:

Nathan, I never said it wasn't valid. I merely said that clearing storage alone wasn't going to speed up your Mac and there was no explanation of why it would help.

Rob, good point and excellent tip.

KnowledgeSeeker, because the focus of the article was performance, I didn't mention battery life.

James, good tip on the calculate folder sizes. I have to disagree about leaving desktops on all night though. That's a real waste of energy.

Raquel, the article doesn't say that emptying the trash won't speed up your Mac. As the article is 52 ways to speed up your Mac, this is assumed. Not explaining why clearing disk space may help in some situations may have an effect on performance is doing a disservice to a reader because they may start clearing disk space despite having plenty of space available.

May 16, 2007 5:08 AM
mike stone said:

Having items in the trash can slow the system down in certain pathological cases.

Apple uses linear-time algorithms for some filesystem operations. If you throw away two files with the same name, for instance, the Finder automatically renames the second one "[filename] copy 1". The next file with the same name will become "[filename] copy 2", and so on. Thing is, the Finder has to check each new name to see if it already exists, and that gets time consuming when you get up around "[filename] copy 300".

Aside from that, *all* filesystem code gets sluggish when you ask it to oprerate on directories with large numbers of files. Simply displaying a directory with 20,000 files in it can take several seconds.

So for situations like the one mentioned in the original article, where people haven't emptied their trash in years, doing so will make subsequent Trash operations quite a bit faster.

May 16, 2007 5:21 AM
CC said:

Some of the tips are new for me. Will try. Thanx!

May 16, 2007 5:28 AM
ky said:

gotta love macs.
'it just works'
/sarcasm off

May 16, 2007 5:33 AM
BobOki said:

One I noticed that was not put in this list, is hard drive defragmenting. While I am aware that because of indexing a lot of people think that this will not speed up your performance, I have to ask people to stop an think for a second. Putting all related data together on a hard drive means the hard drive has less seek time to get to the next piece of info, thus by common sense alone increasing performance. Any gamer that plays WoW can easily see the load time speed increases before and after using iDefrag.

May 16, 2007 5:41 AM
John said:

... or install Cocktail and get it to run all it's tasks (last tab), wait till it's finished then reboot laptop & enjoy.

May 16, 2007 5:42 AM
themacthinker said:

Thanks for sharing this with us. Many of the features that you mentioned definitely help speed up OS X and keep it running smoothly...
http://www.mostofmymac.com

May 16, 2007 6:18 AM
John Pane said:

I think you missed the point the original author was trying to make about various ways to keep your mac in good working order, in general if you have a good working mac then you will have a faster mac.

The author has clearly stated in the original where something is a repeat of another so your not really adding anything by simply adding a few comments to his original article.

May 16, 2007 7:09 AM
JJ Pagac said:

Knew everything except removing doc items. Thanks for the tip!

May 16, 2007 7:14 AM
dancriel said:

Emptying the trash, if you have a large number of items in there, can actually speed up the time it takes to unmount a disk image. Don't ask me why but I've experienced it firsthand on both PPC and Intel Macs.

May 16, 2007 7:44 AM
Tom said:

I believe Apple recommends 20% empty space on your drive for optimal performance, whatever that's worth.

Good list though.

May 16, 2007 8:04 AM
brandaggio said:

I have a first gen Mac Mini and it is pretty slow - running Onyx, clearing out unused startup items and turning off unused functionality dramatically improved its speed.

So for those of us who would like to maximize what we have this is a pretty important topic.

May 16, 2007 8:12 AM
Kate Smith said:

I think your a bit patronising towards the original author. I think he points out where there are repeats in his list.

May 16, 2007 8:20 AM
Genuine Mac said:
Please do not misunderstand this list for something helpful


While the author provides insights into some enhancements, the list is neither new, nor outside the realm of common sense.


May 16, 2007 9:00 AM
MastermacMan said:

I think you're over critical, and a bit jealous of the original authors "fame" of publishing this. They are great tips, and I think the original writer knows these are all not GROUNDSHAKING Speed enhancements. Oh and BTW repairPermissions is a silverbullet fix!

May 16, 2007 10:20 AM
Jose said:

#53: Install Windows or Linux or Solaris. I'm not making a joke or trying to be rude, but I have a quad core Mac Pro and it's incredibly slow at times. Bulk processing is fine, but here's the killer:

The I/O system. A brutish hack of BSD and Mach system calls.

I have four hard drives in my Mac Pro, and if I say extract a RAR file on one disk, to the same disk - a disk that neither my swap file, operating system, or home directory is on - Safari practically freezes. Anything that tries disk IO just locks hard until the RAR is finished extracting (and it's not just RARs that do this).

I'm running software RAID-1 for the disks that make up my home directory (for some reason Apple -disabled- the hardware RAID-1 controller that comes with the Mac Pro's chipset), and I think this is probably the issue, but it's absurd that Apple wouldn't test for setups like this.

And yes, I've reinstalled OSX and begged for support.

May 16, 2007 2:36 PM
So many idiots?? said:

Note to idiots saying thanka for the tips: He is trying to tell you that most of these things are a waste of time!

May 17, 2007 3:17 AM
Mike said:

Watch out for keeping pages with animated ads open, especially in Firefox. I've often seen Firefox use 90% or more CPU while displaying one or more Flash animations. Camino & Opera both seem to use less CPU time.

May 17, 2007 8:49 AM
mabsey said:

#32: Tiger does not run the maintenance scripts on start up if the Mac was off. Launchd doesn't work like that. Check out the X Lab for details on this common misconception. http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html

Install Anacron though and it will run the scripts on reboot (if required).

May 21, 2007 2:18 AM
Gus said:

I'm very greatful for your advices..thank you!! :)

May 28, 2007 2:55 AM

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