System Tray icons piling up; gumming the system?

[estockme]

My 2009 imac (maxed out 8gb ram) is finally starting to get a bit creaky. I'm wondering if all the services I run today that I didn't two years ago, especially cloud and backup stuff like dropbox, google music, skydrive and crashplan are slowing things down in back. They don't have huge memory footprints (except google music, which occasionally just runs away and hangs with over 1gb taken), but my windows days remind me of all the little icons that would sneak into the taskbar.

And anyhow, why does the mac force us to look at all these things? It bums me out in the first place. I know the app bartender can be helpful, but then given the slowdown lately I just worry about papering over all these little things running in my background.

 

[AlanShutko]

The icons themselves probably don't slow things down much, but they can get in the way. Most programs will allow you to turn off the menu icon. Unfortunately, Dropbox (the only one in your list that I also use) does not. For me, the main problem is that there are just so many icons up there, so I tend to prune them pretty far back. If I don't use the icon to access the program in a week, I turn it off.

But even though the icon itself isn't slowing things down, the programs and services could be. I don't have a link handy to one of the articles that helps you track down things slowing your system down, but I'm sure someone else will post tips.