Tips on keepin a mini run fast

Have you tried changing the procesor performance in the the energy settings/options/ panel?
That should help, my G5 has it, I dony know about the mini.

Have you checked Activity Monitor to see if there's a single process hogging all the resources because your mini really shouldn't be chugging.

rossoUK said:

Ive had my mini now for 6 days. It seems to be getting slower and slower. Its the 1.4MHz version with 512 mb of RAM. There is ample space on my hard drive but it still behaves slow at times. Its really annoying. Is there someway I can ensure the computer is in tip top shape. Yeah the 1gig stick is on the way before u guys get on at me about more memory. Thanks!

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1.4mhz...hmm, seems to me they might have sent you some Apple IIE hardware in there. j/k I've heard others speaking of how their minis have been slowing down also...unsure why though. Hopefully its not really slowing down, I'm planning on getting on eventually. And it looks like you've taken the right step in ordering the 1gb.

One thing you could do to increase the speed substantially is to buy a 7200RPM Firewire External drive to boot off of.

Sort them by CPU usage because I'm guessing it's CPU-related as opposed to RAM-related since you've got a bit of spare RAM, but I might be wrong. Is anything using up a particularly large amount of your CPU?

Virex?

sounds to me like a case of too many haxies running

tfaz1 said:

Virex?

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It could be but that'd account for it being slow, not for it becoming slow.

I'm assuming that rossoUK bought the mini new and has Tiger pre-installed. Is that right?

Is the 168MB of RAM showing as 'free' or as 'inactive'? If it's 'inactive', then it was being used at some point; perhaps during one of those applications that you noticed a slowdown on and then quit out of? What's your page in/page outs look like?

Have you restarted it and see if the problems are still there? While you have relatively low RAM and if you're really swapping out memory performing big tasks, you might have to restart more often (and just ignore the uptime boasters)

Any particular application that's being slow in typing etc? Safari can end up consuming vast amounts of memory/virtual memory if you run with a lot of tabs. It may help quitting and emptying its cache. Certainly under 10.3, it could also help to turn off the 'other' form filling under System Preferences too.

Last thing - tho I'm pretty sure you've already figured this (but you are new to Macs so will throw it out there). Closing the last window of an app doesn't quit the app (necessarily) - you might want to check that there's nothing open that you thought you'd closed earlier.

Isn't 0 pageouts actually really awesome?

going from 512 to 1 gig makes a big difference. I had it with my dual 1.8. From stock 512 mb put 1 gig and restarted. It boots up twice as fast and the os is much snappier.

0 page outs? That would mean it hasn't had to retrieve anything it's cached to disk yet. Did you get these stats soon after a boot? That would still be hard to believe.

I purchased 1.42 GHz Mac mini 2-3 months ago and upgraded to Tiger as well. I have not had any of these problems. I've had two or three system hang-ups, but nothing that a hard reboot didn't fix. I am running with 1 GB and only briefly ran it with my 256 stick before upgrading it.

512 MB should be enough, your machine shouldn't be so bogged down that typing is delayed. Must be something else going on. Does this slowness occur from the moment you boot/login or is it only after you start to use some apps? Any apps in particular? As another poster asked, do you notice anything eating up the CPU? A screenshot/grab of the Activity Monitor might help.

Launch Activity Monitor, sort by %CPU, take a screenshot and post. Perhaps you have a rogue process...Have you tried rebooting? Same issues?

Doesn't seem to be anything soaking up the CPU cycles. You're all out of RAM and this time you have page outs. I can't see your entire list but if you have enough apps running you may just be soaking up all your memory. 512 MB is a decent amount of RAM for OS X, which has good caching routines. Although with the mini's slow hard drive perhaps paging is a double hit for you. I've always operated with 1 GB and haven't had issues.

Wait for your 1 GB stick and see if the problem goes away. Anyone else have other ideas?

Either use Firefox or periodically quit out of Safari and reopen it, Safari consumes a LOT of memory, it used to drive me up the wall while my Powerbook only had 512mb RAM so I switched to Firefox. When I got my 2GB of RAM though I switched to Safari as I prefer it and have the RAM there it can consume if it wants, like at the moment it is using over 300mb of real memory and 700 of Virtual with 8 tabs open, which is quite normal for me.

I hope Apple can optimize Safari a lot more to make better use of memory soon as right now it is a dog!

While Safari doesn't use 300MB on my comp (~100 is max), that is what is slowing down your computer. Also, look at all those pageouts. When the number of pageouts is near the number of pageins, you need more RAM. Wouldn't be such a problem, but you have tons of processes like Growl that just sit and waste memory.

Since its a nice little lightweight mini, could you possibly take it to one of the Apple Stores and show it to them? I thought they were supposed to be able to give you help and support on the spot? That's if there are any near you though, of course.

Phil

Edit: Sorry, I see you're in the UK so the chances that you're near to a proper full sized Apple Store is rather small.

Safari's taking up a lot of RAM from what I can see. I had something like this and realised that a plugin intensive page was loaded up (Flash all over the show). This caused Safari to take up loads of RAM and slow the system to a crawl.

Its quite possible this isnt the case and you've already restarted the computer at least once, but thought i'd throw it in as a suggestion.

I hope you get this fixed though, and let us know what it was!