MBP performance tune up

[spydr]

My MBP behaves very sluggishly to my everyday tasks🙁 . Eg.
-takes about 45-55 seconds to launch Word after a boot up.
-boot up takes about a minute or more.
-time from sleep to password screen takes about 15-30 seconds of 'beachballing'.
-quitting applications (particularly PPC ones) takes quite a bit of time.
-All in all, it does *feel* a lot more sluggish than it used to be during the first few months of its life. And I see a lot of that damn 'watch' and 'beachball' than I used to.

Hardware: Stock MBP 2.0GHz, 1gb RAM, 100gb HDD with 30gb free
By the end of the day after a reboot I end up with about 150,000 pageouts.
I have installed and deleted a lot of trial applications as I am new to mac (about 1 yr since switch) and am still trying to discover new apps and utilities.
So my questions are:
1: Are there any good tune up utilities that can help bring my MBP to its peak performance? I have tried ONYX but no big difference.
2. Does the high no. of pageouts I get imply/demand another 1gb of memory? Because I don't want to spend $300 only to discover the performance issue was unrelated to RAM. So I would like that to be the last resort.

Thanks!

 

[Chanabra]

Here.

Try Cocktail: http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/
Onyx works great for me, so try getting the newest version..
Try Onyx: http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

You don't need to upgrade your RAM, but there's a chance your RAM could be fault, or at least some of your hardware is fault.

This is a great program that comes with applecare, but you can also buy it..
Techtool:
http://www.micromat.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=83

I think Techtool can actually identify if there are any faults in your hardware.
It's solved alot of problems for me in the past.

Best of luck to you.

 

[spydr]

Try Cocktail: http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/
Onyx works great for me, so try getting the newest version..
Try Onyx: http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

You don't need to upgrade your RAM, but there's a chance your RAM could be fault, or at least some of your hardware is fault.

I just downloaded onyx yesterday and ran the ones checked by default under "automation" tab. It did not include 'optimise perfomance' though- in the help I recall reading something like, it will break associations/links etc? So I did run everything else that were turned on by default and restarted the system. Only a small improvement (and I am not sure if it is purely psychological!)

I wish there is a benchmarking system that I could use to compare how the system is really faring at different tasks, in real life scenario so as to compare with other MBP users.

I don't want to buy any diagnostic tool yet - I will try to see if can borrow it from someone. Thanks for the pointers though.

 

[trainguy77]

Well go into activity monitor and look to see what is taking your CPU also look at whats taking real ram. Is their something that is crazy high?

 

[spydr]

Well go into activity monitor and look to see what is taking your CPU also look at whats taking real ram. Is their something that is crazy high?

Nothing unusual there. That is where the pageouts are from. As I said by the end of the day, the free memory is always less than 50MB and page outs are more than 150,000. Of course, the memory recovers if I quit all the apps. But I thought if you have enough RAM, then paging out the hard disk will be limited. That is why I asked if this is an indication for getting more memory.

I ran an Xbench today with all several apps in the background (score 83) and with nothing but xbench (score 86). A comparison to another similar system is here>> http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc2=188583

Overall it seems that one test my MBP sucks really in, is uncached read (particularly sequential) - mine lower than every other one I have compared.

 

[mklos]

If you create a new user account, log into it does it seem sluggish after a while?*

It almost sounds like you've installed something that its using a lot of power/RAM to do whatever its supposed to be doing.*


If absolutely nothing works, then I would back your stuff up and erase and reinstall OS X and all of your apps.*

 

[jcnoob]

solutions:

1) download mainmenu here
mainmenu is a menubar app that can clean out old log files,clean user/browser and system caches, run maintenance scripts and more. this will clean up some space and memory.

2) get Xslimmer.
search youtube or torrents to get a free version
xslimmer deletes unused languages of applications and architecture (ie. change the PPC structure to intel if your running intel mac). it slimmed 190+ MB and thats basic apps that came with my macbook!

3) monolingual is like xslimmer but you can choose what language you want to delete and it also delete language files and input menus etc

4)Onyx
its a nice uttility that can tune up your mac.

5) if you have mac osx Leopard, download secrets.
its a pref pane and it lets you use a lot of hidden options.
one good option is to enable quartz 2D extreme and quartz GL.
ths will boost performance.

6)when deleting things, use appzapper ( go to "serialz.to" ) to get the serial/reg code =). it deletes support files, uninstallers and scripts that came with the app you want to delete.

7) clean up startup items
8)empty trash

9) repair permissions in disk uttility. can do this in mainmenu and onyx
10) obvious. add more RAM. this will greatly improve performance than other apps.

 

[jcnoob]

get xbench for benchmarking

 

[highjumppudding]

OK. first of all, max out the ram to as much as you can get in there. that is most likely your problem. also, with a hard drive that full, or getting that full, they get slower. so trash any data you do not need to free space, or transfer to an external. a bigger and faster hard drive would help too, but you have to get a technician to upgrade that. there arent really any software tools out there that are that great for this kinda stuff. it doesnt seem to be your problem anyway. i used to work at apple, geniuses never "recommended" it. they dont really do what they say they do. also, unclutter your desktop if it is fully with folders and files. you can simply drag everything into one folder and that should fix that problem. but number 1, GET MORE RAM. then unload or trash some files and clean that desktop, THEN i would consider software if you need it. also, REPAIR PERMISSIONS on your boot drive via Disk Utility on the Mac. it should help too. best of luck.