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Chomolungma

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 25, 2002
206
0
Santa Fe, NM
I think my PB is sluggish, and I think the fragmented hard drive is to blame. Does anyone know of a freeware that can solve this problem.

-Chomo
:(
 
If you notice when you finish installing any type of software/update you'll see the installer saying Optimizing Volume... from what I get that is your defragmentation taking place.
 
Are you sure you've got enough RAM? Is it sluggish overall, or just when you do certain things?
 
yeah..open the terminal ...and write
sudo periodic daily.....press enter
sudo periodic weekly.... press enter
sudo periodic monthly ...press enter...
this will take care of the cron jobs...see if its still sluggish...if yes..i guess you dont have enough ram..
 
thanks for the immediate replies

I'm running Panther on a TiBook 400 mhz, with 384MB RAM. It is only running Safari and iTunes 99% of the time. I should tell you that the hard drive is nearly full. Maybe it is time to get a new computer :D . Be that as it may, I'll try the terminal/command approach.

-Chomo
 
Chomolungma said:
I'm running Panther on a TiBook 400 mhz, with 384MB RAM. It is only running Safari and iTunes 99% of the time. I should tell you that the hard drive is nearly full. Maybe it is time to get a new computer :D . Be that as it may, I'll try the terminal/command approach.

-Chomo

The HD is to blame IMHO. OS X uses lots of virtual memory (HD space); mine has 3.2GB (!) right now though it's stille got 290MB of inactive RAM + 15 MB free RAM. I always leave at least 10% of my HD empty. Maybe you should make some space before condemning the PBook. ;)
 
fragmentation has never been a problem in osx and is even less of a problem in panther. do a forum search to pull up about 30 threads on it. hfs+ writes files to the largest free block on the hd so it fragments far less than windows will, and 10.3 will defrag all files under 20mb automatically if the volume is journaled. if your computer becoming sluggish, it's probably the ram or cron issues already mentioned.
 
blue&whiteman said:
even 10% free is pushing it. I have a 120gb and like to keep no less than 30gb free.

That's massive overkill IMO. OSX does a pretty poor job of cleaning up after itself where VM is concerned, but you can always check to see how much disk space is devoted to VM by looking into the directory ..private/var/vm. If you've got more than a couple of gigabytes devoted to VM files, then it's time to log out, which deletes most of them, or reboot, which gets rid of the rest.
 
crees! said:
If you notice when you finish installing any type of software/update you'll see the installer saying Optimizing Volume... from what I get that is your defragmentation taking place.
No, that's not what it's doing--I believe the post-install optimization involves linking libraries to applications, but in any case it isn't defragmentation.

But, as others said, 10.3 does simple defragmentation automatically, so any speed issue is probably something else. If you must defrag, though, there's no freeware to do it.
 
IJ Reilly said:
That's massive overkill IMO. OSX does a pretty poor job of cleaning up after itself where VM is concerned, but you can always check to see how much disk space is devoted to VM by looking into the directory ..private/var/vm. If you've got more than a couple of gigabytes devoted to VM files, then it's time to log out, which deletes most of them, or reboot, which gets rid of the rest.

in my experiences the more free space I have the more speed, stability and uptime I get from the drive and in turn the system. its the same I idea to say a cpu will perform better the less its doing.
 
Makosuke said:
No, that's not what it's doing--I believe the post-install optimization involves linking libraries to applications, but in any case it isn't defragmentation.

But, as others said, 10.3 does simple defragmentation automatically, so any speed issue is probably something else. If you must defrag, though, there's no freeware to do it.

it's called prebinding... i'm sure what the importance is but it'd bad if you don't let it do that after installing something.

reality
 
OS X does defragging automatically? i've never heard about that... any links to back that up? :confused:

i thought that fragmentation problems with HFS & OS X were so minimal that Apple thought it wasnt' necessary to worry about it.
 
:rolleyes: If OS X did auto defrag, my volume wouldn't be 60% fragged when I run disk warrior would it (PowerMac G4 8xx 512 ram 80 gig hd few years old)?

or when I got a NEW PB it wouldn't be 2% fragged when it came and 40% after installing all the software I wanted would it?


No there are not any free defrag utilities, and if there were, I wouldn't use them....
 
cb911 said:
OS X does defragging automatically? i've never heard about that... any links to back that up? :confused:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Fragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existing files, especially with resource forks. With faster hard drives and better caching, as well as the new application packaging format, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering."

So actually only Panther does defragging automatically. The HFS+ format contains some preventative measures as well, as FattyMembrane said:

Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible, to avoid prematurely filling small areas of recently-freed space.

And Jaguar also introduced some preventative measures:

Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk.

The article does mention that fragmentation could occur if the hard drive is low on space. Otherwise, as the article says:

There is little benefit to defragmenting.

Hopefully this will clear a few things up. :)
 
For reference, the details that the article about auto 10.3 defragmenting didn't mention have been discussed extensively in past threads.

Here's a brief rundown from MacSlash:

http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/190237

Basically, if memory serves, Panther starts defragmenting after it's been on for four hours (I think that's the number), and what it does is defragment files under 20MB. It also moves frequently accessed files to the fastest part of the disk (the hot clustering business).

The thing this doesn't help with is very large files, of course--video editing is the obvious issue, although Bittorrent, if you don't let it create the whole file in advance, is notorious for causing vicious fragmentation. If you work with big files a lot (or keep your disk almost full, which isn't a good idea anyway), manual defragmentation with some utility might help.
 
Chomolungma said:
I'm running Panther on a TiBook 400 mhz, with 384MB RAM. It is only running Safari and iTunes 99% of the time. I should tell you that the hard drive is nearly full. Maybe it is time to get a new computer :D . Be that as it may, I'll try the terminal/command approach.

-Chomo

I have a G3 Powerbook with a 6gb hard drive. Panther performance is very good until I get down to about 500mb remaining. Below that, Panther just crawls. (I'm planning to upgrade to a 40gb hard drive in the next couple of weeks.)
 
HexMonkey said:
Mac OS X pretty much does defragging automatically. I doubt that is the problem.

Bahh nvm, i see that everyone else already covered the hfs+ thing.
 
Ok i am just going to clear something up real quick:

Prebinding and defragmenting are different, defragging moves all files that it possibly can into an order than optomizes the speed. Prebinding is when the applications are linked dynamically to the libraries. Instead of including the libraries in every app (like os 9 and windows do) is just links them. And when you update prebindings it checks to see whether or not the binding is up to date. This is why os x apps (generally speaking) are smaller than windows or os 9 versions of the app.
 
2 GB of free space in a 20 GB drive

Flowbee said:
I have a G3 Powerbook with a 6gb hard drive. Panther performance is very good until I get down to about 500mb remaining. Below that, Panther just crawls. (I'm planning to upgrade to a 40gb hard drive in the next couple of weeks.)

i experience the same, when I fill it up below 1 GB. I even get a warning message. I'll probably have to manually delete a few of many tiff pictures and monster size Powerpoint presentatons.

This topic leads into the faster computer debate. People in here talk mostly about having faster processor clock as the solution. What about faster storage solution especially in laptop that won't drain the battery?

-Chomo
 
IJ Reilly said:
That's massive overkill IMO. OSX does a pretty poor job of cleaning up after itself where VM is concerned, but you can always check to see how much disk space is devoted to VM by looking into the directory ..private/var/vm. If you've got more than a couple of gigabytes devoted to VM files, then it's time to log out, which deletes most of them, or reboot, which gets rid of the rest.

Actually he's got it pretty much spot on, in my experience 20% is the real sweet-spot for performance etc. Although I agree as his hard-drive is so big (not jealous not jealous) he probably doesn't need 30GiB set aside, unless he works with very large files.
To back me up (people seem to like asking for backups in this thread :)), macfixit.com said;

Keep some "head room" on your Mac OS X volume for best performance, fewer errors

A quick reminder that Mac OS X requires at least 10 percent of the volume it is contained on as free space in order to maintain the integrity of the file system. However, even with 10 percent free space, Mac OS X's use swap files - as well as extra data generated by third-party application caches, etc. - can quickly put you back into a position of possible directory/file damage.

Realistically, 20 percent of your Mac OS X startup volume should be kept clear in order to achieve best performance and avoid disk problems.

Also I'd like to point out that 3rd party defragmenting programs can "un-do" all the good work done by Panthers Hot-file clustering, seeing it as excess fragmentation and moving it all around again.

Ages ago I had the source code for the hot-file crap, I wonder where that went :confused:

AppleMatt
 
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