How to best perform maintenance on a Mac to increase performance

[cap2587]

I am wanting to get some ideas on how best to speed up performance of Mac computers. What causes the beach ball to just keep spinning when placed over the Notification icons in the top right corner of the screen (TM, WIFi, Time etc.)

I realize that hardware will play a big roll, but wondered on the software side if there were some tweaks to increase performance.

What about using Onyx or CleanMyMac programs. If one or both is good to use is there particular settings that need to be changed prior to running these. How about repair disk permissions? Limiting start up programs. Looking at Activity Monitor. Appreciate any suggestions.

 

[GGJstudios]

I would not recommend using CleanMyMac or any of its variants, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much. Here's a recent example. While you may not have experienced problems yet, enough people have that it's wise to avoid it, especially since there are free alternatives that have better reputations, such as Onyx.

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. Most only 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. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt. Many of these tasks 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.

Five Mac maintenance myths​

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

 

[cap2587]

Thanks for the valuable information. From what I gathered your suggesting treading carefully and not rushing to do maintenance if it is not necessary.

I read through Performance Tips For Mac OS X and thought it had some good tips. What would you recommend on an Imac running an I-5 and 8 GB of RAM that was experiencing slowness. Main problem is the beach ball spinning for 1-2 min when clicking on any notification icons in the top right corner.

 

[GGJstudios]

Thanks for the valuable information. From what I gathered your suggesting treading carefully and not rushing to do maintenance if it is not necessary.

I read through Performance Tips For Mac OS X and thought it had some good tips. What would you recommend on an Imac running an I-5 and 8 GB of RAM that was experiencing slowness. Main problem is the beach ball spinning for 1-2 min when clicking on any notification icons in the top right corner.

I'd recommend implementing the performance tips I posted, particularly #5.