How to perform maintenance on Lion?

Just let the OS do it's thing. It is a mature OS, and it knows what it's doing. When you read these threads for a while, you will start to notice that many software issues people have are because they started running "maintenance scripts" and little apps to make things run better. Often, they just gum up the works. So... just listen to Weasleboy, and get on with creating stuff on your iMac.

Weaselboy said:

You don't need to do anything. There is an automated script that runs maintenance on its own each day. Nothing else needs to be done manually.

Click to expand...

What about the cron routines? Perhaps this has changed, but those unix-based routines run at something like 1 AM or 3 AM, IIRC, because they were designed in the 80's to run on mainframes. That means if you close the lid at 10 PM and open it at 8 AM, those routines will never run, that is supposing that Apple has never addressed this.

There is an easy way to get them to run, tho, which is to leave the computer running overnight once every 30 days. Or, use Cocktail to run them.

<edit> in trying to answer my own questionm I stumbled across this:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

which appears to have a surprising amount of valuable info on the subject.

MacNoobGuy said:

hey guys, i just wanted to know what inbuilt maintenance type apps Lion had built in. i looked through 'system preferences' and couldn't find anything.

Click to expand...

You don't need to maintain your Mac and you don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some can even degrade, rather than improve system performance.

Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process. These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space.

Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt. Caches exist to improve performance, so deleting them isn't advisable in most cases.

Many of the tasks performed by these apps should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention. You can use Maintidget to see the last time these scripts were run.

TyroneShoes2 said:

What about the cron routines? ...

<edit> in trying to answer my own questionm I stumbled across this:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

which appears to have a surprising amount of valuable info on the subject.

Click to expand...

That site is offering advice on some pretty old versions of OS X. If you have a current version, I would not put much faith in its advice.

From what I've read about the current versions of OS X, those issues are no longer an issue. The scripts get run regardless of whether the system is off, on, or sleeping, at night. For instance.... OS X doesn't use Cron anymore to do these, it uses Launchd. As I said earlier, Apple has engineered OS X to work without any user maintenance, unless there is a problem. Users who start mucking around under the hood, when there are no issues, are often creating problems - not preventing them. I was a bona fide 'under the hood mucker' - and when I stopped, so did all sorts of little problems.

Just let the system alone, and you will be happier. Really. Get busy creating.

MacNoobGuy said:

ok thanks. this sounds like really good advice. especially this part:

Click to expand...

So... what have you created? 'Tis the season and all that, eh?

I just run the "Verify Disk Permissions" in Disk Utility every few months.
The Mac does the "Verify Disk" every few bootups (if i remember correctly, every 5) so there is no need to worry about that.

But then again, I'm running 10-12 year old G4 systems and 10.4 Tiger.