What are Your "Open @ Login" Items? How Many? Does it Slow Your System? Worth it?

[HappyDude20]

I just did a complete reinstall of Snow Leopard and am wondering what your login items are.

Before the reinstall I always had OmniFocus and iCal open up, alongside a few menubar items such as Caffeine and Dropbox, and LogMeIn.

I'm wondering others have much more login items open up immediately after turning on their Mac.

I always limited my login items, remembering hearing that too many can slow the system down. Though as of late have upgraded from 2GB of RAM, to 4GBs.

I'm thinking about making Pages open at login too, considering I end up using it daily, and having a spare electronic piece of parchment is always good in my mind.

 

[Sergeant Pepper]

I have an AppleScript that I set to run at startup that launches all of the applications I need running with a five-second delay between each. The reason that your computer slows down with a ton of login items enabled is that OS X launches them all at the same time; using an AppleScript setup like mine solves that problem by staggering the launches.

 

[classic_henry]

I have an AppleScript that I set to run at startup that launches all of the applications I need running with a five-second delay between each.

Any chance you are willing to share the script, or just the basis for how it works?

 

[chown33]

Any chance you are willing to share the script, or just the basis for how it works?

It's not complicated. You should be able to easily create it for yourself as an Automator Workflow or Application (two of the options when you first launch Automator).

It's basically going to be:

1. Pause for some time interval.
2. Launch some application.
3. Pause for some time interval.
4. Launch some application.

In other words, two simple actions, repeated again and again, as many times as you want. The first action's name is "Pause". The second action's name is "Launch Application".

 

[Weaselboy]

Any chance you are willing to share the script, or just the basis for how it works?

Here is what I use launched as an Alfred workflow, but is is really just an Applescript. You can tweak it with whatever applications you want.

This launches the apps on the list, then hides them all, then launches Safari up front.

tell application "Contacts" to launch
tell application "Mail" to launch
tell application "Messages" to launch
delay 2
do shell script "open ~/Documents/ibank5_current.ibank"
tell application "iTunes" to launch
tell application "ReadKit" to launch
delay 2
activate application "Finder"
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "h" using {command down, option down}
tell application "WeathrClip" to launch
tell application "Safari" to activate

 

[Gregg2]

I have two: a reminder app and a browser. The former seems to be the one that slows down the startup process. I use it for all kinds of things, so, yeah, it's worth the wait.

 

[Watabou]

Here is what I use launched as an Alfred workflow, but is is really just an Applescript. You can tweak it with whatever applications you want.

This launches the apps on the list, then hides them all, then launches Safari up front.

tell application "Contacts" to launch
tell application "Mail" to launch
tell application "Messages" to launch
delay 2
do shell script "open ~/Documents/ibank5_current.ibank"
tell application "iTunes" to launch
tell application "ReadKit" to launch
delay 2
activate application "Finder"
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "h" using {command down, option down}
tell application "WeathrClip" to launch
tell application "Safari" to activate

Any chance you are willing to share the script, or just the basis for how it works?

For what it's worth, or for anyone else that might want it, you can use the applescript Weaselboy provided with Spotlight too. Just save it as .app and place it wherever you want within Spotlight's search directories. I like /Applications/Scripts for this purpose. Then just launch that using Spotlight.

I have several scripts setup like this here if you want (it uses the new Javascript for Automation instead of Applescript): https://github.com/ajh17/Scripts. The one that opens apps is called OpenApps.app in that repository.

Thus, I have 0 items in my login items list. This way, I get the benefit of the quick login and I can manually control when you launch all of the apps, just by invoking spotlight and running my script through it.

 

[snipper]

A script can spread the load but on the other hand it will take longer before startup is completed. Depending on the type of Mac (small Macs use less energy in sleep mode, a Mac Pro 2008 still uses 35 Watt) you might want to just put it in sleep instead.

You mention the amount of RAM. 4 GB might still not a be lot of memory, depending on the number and type of applications you are running. However, when it comes to starting up / loading, you might want to consider an SSD upgrade. This will dramatically speed things up, even on older Macs.

Starting up in particular will benefit from it, but also loading apps and documents. If the RAM isn't sufficient, your computer will use the disk as a substitute. Again, this will be several times faster if this is an SSD. Prices of SSDs have come down a lot lately.