Improvement on Leopard's Finder performance after Archive and Install

[AppleCandidate]

I experienced improvements in the speed of the Finder after doing an Archive and Install on my new Mac Mini 2 Ghz. (i had previously done an upgrade installation)

Moving files used to take seconds. Even after installation, it still took a while, i had to do this action several times before the machine actually seemed to learn this process and it is now instant. Opening folders is now instant. I still believe that Tiger was somewhat faster.

As far as the choppy animations, Expose seems fine, the widgets open slow or faster depending on how many applications are running at the same time. The dock seems fine, but the grid opening of applications in the dock remains jerky. I see this seems to be a problem on faster machines as well.

 

[rpp3po]

That's probably due to fragmentation of the old install. HFS+'s total resilence against fragmentation is a persistent myth. Granted, HFS+ is light years ahead of FAT32 concerning the matter, but it is not immune. It slowly builds up over time. You can easily verify this by running hfsdebug. On a sufficiently old Tiger partition you will find several files with 100 or even 500 and more fragments.

It is caused by badly written applications which write files by appending chunck after chuck while omitting to report at least the minimum (if not exact) size of the file to the operating system.

The fresh install has probably been written into contigous free space. As long as the installer reports the actual size of every file and directory to the OS, the installation can be written to a very compact and nice pattern on your disk.

I've heard that the common defragmenters are not Leopard ready, yet. I don't use them anyway. HFS+ is pretty good and it is sufficient to identify badly scattered files once in a while using hfsdebug. You then just duplicate those in the finder and erase the old copies.

I experienced improvements in the speed of the Finder after doing an Archive and Install on my new Mac Mini 2 Ghz. (i had previously done an upgrade installation)

Moving files used to take seconds. Even after installation, it still took a while, i had to do this action several times before the machine actually seemed to learn this process and it is now instant. Opening folders is now instant. I still believe that Tiger was somewhat faster.

As far as the choppy animations, Expose seems fine, the widgets open slow or faster depending on how many applications are running at the same time. The dock seems fine, but the grid opening of applications in the dock remains jerky. I see this seems to be a problem on faster machines as well.