Keeping your Mac "clean"

Clear your Safari cache and history: those things can bog down the browser and eat up disk. Setup "Remove History" to be 30 days or less.

Ditto large e-mail mailboxes: do you really need to keep really old e-mails in the mailbox? Can always export those out and delete from the mailbox.

Some places that chew up disk:

Safari webpage previews folder. I've got mine set to noone having any read/write privileges.

I've got periodic scripts to clear out "CrashReporter" and "DiagnosticReports" in user accounts that are over seven days old (they can really stack up if you've had some buggy software of late). Ditto system level one's (in /Library). And a once a quarter periodic script that clears out old log files in /var/log and under user accounts (~/Library/Logs).

2008 MBP, and no performance issues with Mavericks.

 

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

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

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.

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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.

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Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance. 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​

Some people repair, or recommend repairing permissions for situations where it isn't appropriate. Repairing permissions only addresses very specific issues. It is not a "cure all" or a general performance enhancer, and doesn't need to be done on a regular basis. It also doesn't address permissions problems with your files or 3rd party apps.

Repairing permissions: What you need to know
About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature​

There are times when repairing permissions is appropriate. To do so, here are the instructions:

Repairing Disk Permissions​

If repairing permissions results in error messages, some of these messages can be ignored and should be no cause for concern.

Mac OS X: Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore​

 

Download the run the freeware EtreCheck and run it. Whatever is in red manually delete it because it is not compatible with 10.9.x. This should help clean up your Mac especially if you did an "upgrade" to 10.9.x.

The after manually delete the red services do a reboot.