Streamlining OS X: Making it run as fast as possible

Re: Streamlining OS X: Making it run as fast as possible

Originally posted by springscansing
I was wondering if anyone had some good tips for streamlining OS X. I am running 10.2.4, but my HD seems to be chugging away sometims when I'm doing nothing. I guess running two servers and folding and Carrafix and Electric Sheep isn't helping... but...

If anyone has some good tips to make X actually function faster, not time saving utility sort of stuff, I'd really appreciate it.

Also, is there any free way to defragment my hard disk?

Click to expand...

Open terminal. Type, "vm_stat" (without the quotes). If the number next to pageouts is really high, buy more ram. This will stop it from hitting your disk so much, which really slows things down.

Re: Re: Streamlining OS X: Making it run as fast as possible

Originally posted by Catfish_Man
Open terminal. Type, "vm_stat" (without the quotes). If the number next to pageouts is really high, buy more ram. This will stop it from hitting your disk so much, which really slows things down.

Click to expand...

That command and top don't work for me for some reason. Also I don't appear to have any manuals either.

Could it be because the last time I installed OSX I did a custom install and chose not to install all the BSD/developer stuff.

Yeah, you need BSD to run most of the unix stuff. It will help streamline the operations too, just because of some of the things BSD does.

JW

Originally posted by skywalker
Yeah, you need BSD to run most of the unix stuff.

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BSD is built in to OSX (it IS the unix stuff). the developer tools install other stuff (like ProjectBuilder).

MacBandit -- top and vm_stat are in /usr/bin. that needs to be in your path. is it?

for most shells, type (w/o the percent):

% echo $PATH

to see if /usr/bin is in there. it should be by default. perhaps you set your own path and neglected /usr/bin?

Originally posted by zimv20
BSD is built in to OSX (it IS the unix stuff). the developer tools install other stuff (like ProjectBuilder).

MacBandit -- top and vm_stat are in /usr/bin. that needs to be in your path. is it?

for most shells, type (w/o the percent):

% echo $PATH

to see if /usr/bin is in there. it should be by default. perhaps you set your own path and neglected /usr/bin?

Click to expand...

It's entirely possible to customize the installation and skip the BSD subsystem. not a great idea tho.

i don't know if you can go in and install it later by itself, or you have to reinstall the whole OS... try it and find out. I recommend adding it.

pnw

Originally posted by paulwhannel
It's entirely possible to customize the installation and skip the BSD subsystem. not a great idea tho.

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didn't know you could do that. how the heck does the system run then?

i'll amend my earlier statement: if ones uses the default installation, everything should be set up to run top and vm_stat

Re: Re: Streamlining OS X: Making it run as fast as possible

Open terminal. Type, "vm_stat" (without the quotes). If the number next to pageouts is really high, buy more ram. This will stop it from hitting your disk so much, which really slows things down. [/QUOTE]

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 46179.
Pages active: 31075.
Pages inactive: 38248.
Pages wired down: 15570.
"Translation faults": 327787018.
Pages copy-on-write: 68117.
Pages zero filled: 53504331.
Pages reactivated: 1656042.
Pageins: 75449.
Pageouts: 288483.
Object cache: 33410 hits of 72200 lookups (46% hit rate).

is that good?

Originally posted by zimv20
BSD is built in to OSX (it IS the unix stuff). the developer tools install other stuff (like ProjectBuilder).

MacBandit -- top and vm_stat are in /usr/bin. that needs to be in your path. is it?

for most shells, type (w/o the percent):

% echo $PATH

to see if /usr/bin is in there. it should be by default. perhaps you set your own path and neglected /usr/bin?

Click to expand...

This is the complete terminal window printout including the echo $path command.

Last login: Thu Feb 20 23:03:52 on ttyp1
[12-225-135-132:~] louis% echo $PATH
/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
[12-225-135-132:~] louis%

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I did not, not install the BSD subsystem (I wouldn't even know how to not install it.). While doing a custom install I got information on each installation package and I chose not to install packages that were described as being for developers and unecessary unless you are planning on installing the developer disk. It decreased the insallation size by like 3GB down to just 1GB (I can't remember for sure but that is what I think I remember.).

I just did a search for the invisible folder user. I then opened it up and looked inside for top and man. No go they aren't there so I must not have installed them.

running folding and electric sheep in the background is going to put some stress on your system and as cool as it is to do that, if performance is a big concern, you could try shutting them off for a while. if you have multiple hard drives (or multiple partitions, but preferably hard drives) you can try moving the swap file to a seperate drive (check http://www.macosxhints.com or http://www.lostboi.com for info on this) as well as stocking up on ram. you can try some of the utilities out there that enable window buffer compression (it works for some people). in general, make sure that you run your maintainence scripts on time if your computer is not on 24/7. i also repair permissions about once every 2 weeks (unless it needs it sooner) and do an update_prebinding -force -root / about every month (say what you want about doing this in 10.2 but it works). as far as i know, there is no free defragging utility for osx (i think drive10 and *shudder* norton are the only <i>native</i> osx apps to do this). hfs+ usually does not have too big a problem with fraggmenting, but it would be nice if apple would include this capability in disk utility some time soon.

Originally posted by FattyMembrane
as far as i know, there is no free defragging utility for osx (i think drive10 and *shudder* norton are the only <i>native</i> osx apps to do this). hfs+ usually does not have too big a problem with fraggmenting, but it would be nice if apple would include this capability in disk utility some time soon.

Click to expand...

True there is no free defragger but I would never ever ever call Nortons current product native. It is a patch on a patch on a patch. They patched it to work with OS9 then they patched it to work with OSX then they patched it to work with 10.2. It wasn't to great a product to start with but now, well you figure it out.