Why do I never see any OS X performance tips?


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There are a lot of ways to nudge a few seconds or perf. points out of windows here and there. Why do I never find any for OS X? I find it hard to believe that it's just "perfectly tweaked" out of the box.

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You don't do much with OSX other than running the os and the built in apps. So, why bother?

You're saying you wouldn't want to spend 5min to get a faster OS? and i find it hard to believe most users ONLY use the built in apps.

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You're saying you wouldn't want to spend 5min to get a faster OS? and i find it hard to believe most users ONLY use the built in apps.

For me: no, not unless it saves me substantially more than 5-minutes over the span of a year. Starting up 1 second faster or launching photoshop 2 seconds quicker isn't going to change the way I use my computer and if I ever find my performance is wanting I'll buy new hardware.

Mac OS X more or less just works out of the box and I've just never really felt a need to fiddle with maintenance.

Tips tend to get posted at sites like mac os x hints if you're really interested.

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There are a lot of ways to nudge a few seconds or perf. points out of windows here and there. Why do I never find any for OS X? I find it hard to believe that it's just "perfectly tweaked" out of the box.

cause mac users believe there computer is flawless and requires no maintenance.

i know long ago i heard things like macs handle memory better, and they move/copy files without defragging the hard drive as much.

not sure how true that is, but i would thing the regular stuff for pcs would speed up macs just as much.

doing regular defrags, and keeping your stuff organized. not having tons of stuff on your desktop.

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You're saying you wouldn't want to spend 5min to get a faster OS? and i find it hard to believe most users ONLY use the built in apps.

i do believe that people who buy macs are more conservative, there isn't a huge base of applications and games like windows, so not much to do with other than running office and photoshop...

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"Because it just..." Nope Um ..idk I never really notice any windows tips you just have to look for them or not that many people are having performance problems since its optimized for the system

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i know long ago i heard things like macs handle memory better, and they move/copy files without defragging the hard drive as much.

Partially true - OS X does file de-fragmentation on the fly by placing files on unused areas of the drive if there is enough contiguous space available, much like ext3 on Linux. However, it doesn't take into account the placement of the file on the drive relatively to the other data and this causes disk defragmentation.

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OS X does defragmentation of all files under 20mb whenever they're opened (for read or write). It prefers contiguous writes (as you mentioned) and it also moves "hot files" (frequently accessed files) to the fastest area of the drive.

IIRC this was a new feature in 10.3 so if you look at technical sites from that era you'll probably find a truckload of info about it. Source code is also available in the hfs+ driver

So far as I know Windows and Linux both make similar optimizations (though not necessarily in the same way) so there's not really a lot to give Mac OS X credit for that you couldn't also give to Windows or Linux.

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Macs just run, so we just run them. Who wants fidget factor to be the primary reason for owning a computer? I can suggest Linux if that's your schtick.

Linux gives you lots of room for tinkering because you want to.

Windows XP is great for tinkering because you have to.

Mac OS-X is great for tinkering optional.

Own all three so I have some experience in what I'm dealing with here. :devil:

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The only optimisation I do is slimming unwanted architectures and languages from apps. It can lead to some significant reductions in the size of the apps. And the way I see it, the smaller the app, the quicker it loads and the less RAM it hogs.

Also, unlike Windows the OS doesn't slow down over time. XP is nice and fast when fresh installed. Use it for a year adding/removing programs etc and you won't see the same performance. I heard this is less of an issue since Vista.

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The only optimisation I do is slimming unwanted architectures and languages from apps. It can lead to some significant reductions in the size of the apps. And the way I see it, the smaller the app, the quicker it loads and the less RAM it hogs.

Cocoa applications load their resources on demand so stripping excess nibs and localizations does nothing because those files would never have been loaded anyway. The benefit to doing this is the freed up hard drive space - it'll have no impact on launch time or memory use. If your short on disk space you can shave a gigabyte or more from a standard 10.5 installation - that's not too shabby.

Stripping unneeded architectures is dubious at best - it was discussed in some of the earlier threads about 10.6 and it turned out that removing PPC code from an application like Mail.app (300mb) saved you a megabyte or two on disk (it's never executed so it doesn't help with performance) and in most cases you can't even tell it's been done.

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I think it is a mix of two things. Firstly, many people who switch to Macs do it for that very ideal of spending less time tinkering and more time actually making use of their computers. And secondly, Macs really do need is far less maintenance than PCs. I power use my Mac at work daily for web application development and it still feels as fast now as the day I started on it.

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cause mac users believe there computer is flawless and requires no maintenance.

[citation needed]

Just use OynX occasionally and you're sorted, really. As well as defragging automatically OS X runs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts overnight to keep itself in check. Bit of a stupid question tbf, if extra optimisation was necessary there'd be tips all over the place don't you think?

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i do believe that people who buy macs are more conservative, there isn't a huge base of applications and games like windows, so not much to do with other than running office and photoshop...

BS.

OS X has 99.999% the equivalent programs as windows (not titles necessarily, but equal function programs).

Maybe not so much games, but if you're playing games 99% of the time, who has the time to use any useful programs?

As for the topic at hand, Onyx as mentioned above will clean out caches, and do some of the more common routine maitenance that OS X does on it's own; but wont hurt for you to do more regularly.

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BS.

OS X has 99.999% the equivalent programs as windows (not titles necessarily, but equal function programs).

Maybe not so much games, but if you're playing games 99% of the time, who has the time to use any useful programs?

At what point did he mention "usefulness"?

Games are one of the main things OSes get optimised for, so what he said was justified. (Though obviously there is more than just Office and Photoshop)

Edited by Kirkburn
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At what point did he mention "usefulness"?

Games are one of the main things OSes get optimised for, so what he said was justified. (Though obviously there is more than just Office and Photoshop)

He didn't, but he made it sound as if OS X doesn't have the equivelent software, and that Mac users only use what comes bundled and/or PS and Office. :rolleyes:

I was just implying that we Mac users have just as many useful programs as Windows users.

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He didn't, but he made it sound as if OS X doesn't have the equivelent software, and that Mac users only use what comes bundled and/or PS and Office. :rolleyes:

I was just implying that we Mac users have just as many useful programs as Windows users.

Only if you mean generic software that has some mass appeal, when it comes to more specialized tools there are lots of things that there are no good Mac equivalents to.

That's just the way it is.

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Only if you mean generic software that has some mass appeal, when it comes to more specialized tools there are lots of things that there are no good Mac equivalents to.

That's just the way it is.

If you're talking programs specifically engineered for windows - like specialized database software, or industrial programs, sure. That falls into the .001% of course ;)

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Cocoa applications load their resources on demand so stripping excess nibs and localizations does nothing because those files would never have been loaded anyway. The benefit to doing this is the freed up hard drive space - it'll have no impact on launch time or memory use. If your short on disk space you can shave a gigabyte or more from a standard 10.5 installation - that's not too shabby.

Stripping unneeded architectures is dubious at best - it was discussed in some of the earlier threads about 10.6 and it turned out that removing PPC code from an application like Mail.app (300mb) saved you a megabyte or two on disk (it's never executed so it doesn't help with performance) and in most cases you can't even tell it's been done.

Uh 10.6 is intel only, so far as the OS itself thats the primary reason it uses 6gb less space to install even though almost everything is 64-bit, of course there is a lot more reasons like code optimization and file compression.

I have an early 2009 (built Feb09) iMac 24' the stock internal HDD is a Wester Digital Caviar 2nd Gen. and under OS X file transfers on that drive are around 160 megabytes per sec, I also have VistaSP2 x64 and Win7 x64 RC install on that very same drive and under either one file transfers and only around 80-100 mb per sec.

The OS's just do things differently and for diff reasons, trying to squeeze the most out of the Hardware and the OS with anything really means your just impatient or cheap and didn't or couldn't afford what you really wanted.

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Uh 10.6 is intel only, so far as the OS itself thats the primary reason it uses 6gb less space to install even though almost everything is 64-bit, of course there is a lot more reasons like code optimization and file compression.

If you're going to make this claim: prove it.

Here's my evidence to the contrary

One change I'd make to that post is that removing localization would have worked as I described but Apple took a slightly different approach: they stripped designable nibs and left only the compiled versions. The file size reduction isn't quite as extreme but it's still very impressive and they didn't lose the ability to switch languages on the fly. You can no longer crack open a nib file in interface builder and add features to an application but the compiled nibs are significantly smaller than "designable" ones. Mail has gone from around 300mb in 10.5 to 90mb in 10.6.

The executable file size has actually increased in 10.6 about 25%

and it still contains 32-bit code.

The only reason to think that "everything is 64-bit" or that "code optimization" has somehow reduced the size of applications is because uniformed people are speculating that to be the case and spouting it around on the web. Apple's marketing for the product has this to say about the reduced size:

Smaller footprint.

Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 6GB for you — enough for about 1,500 more songs or a few thousand more photos.6

source

Note how no explanation is given for the reason for the reduced file size and the WWDC keynote (start at 18 minute) doesn't make any mention of this either.

I wrote a simple little application to strip "useless" information from applications and ran mail through it - here's my resulting mail file binary - I stripped it to contain only x86-64 code and saved about 3mb from the 95mb bundle.

The real savings was from purging localizations:

When running the difference in memory used by the stripped versus non-stripped version was insignificant.

5351 is the 64-bit only version, 5350 is the one shipped with 10.6

I have an early 2009 (built Feb09) iMac 24' the stock internal HDD is a Wester Digital Caviar 2nd Gen. and under OS X file transfers on that drive are around 160 megabytes per sec, I also have VistaSP2 x64 and Win7 x64 RC install on that very same drive and under either one file transfers and only around 80-100 mb per sec.

You should double-check your numbers. Western digitals fastest rotation drives aren't as fast as you're claiming the pedestrian one used in the iMac is.

source.

Edited by evn.
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There are a lot of ways to nudge a few seconds or perf. points out of windows here and there.

There are a lot of ways to supposedly nudge a few seconds or perf. points out of windows here and there. Most of them do absolutely nothing and are just useless or even slightly dangerous ("clean the registry") relics from the old Windows 9x-days (when they didn't help that much neither).

I have an early 2009 (built Feb09) iMac 24' the stock internal HDD is a Wester Digital Caviar 2nd Gen. and under OS X file transfers on that drive are around 160 megabytes per sec, I also have VistaSP2 x64 and Win7 x64 RC install on that very same drive and under either one file transfers and only around 80-100 mb per sec.

evn. is right. 160MB/sec isn't possible, check reliable benchmarks. 80-100 sounds about right.

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