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Tuning Mac OS X Performance

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Mac OS X loves RAM. Short of buying a new Mac or a processor upgrade, adding RAM is the best way to improve Mac OS X performance. Install the maximum amount of RAM that your Mac will accept and your budget will allow. Mac OS X... See more » Mac OS X loves RAM. Short of buying a new Mac or a processor upgrade, adding RAM is the best way to improve Mac OS X performance. Install the maximum amount of RAM that your Mac will accept and your budget will allow. Mac OS X makes extensive use of Virtual Memory (VM), which requires free disk space on your startup disk, aka your boot volume. If you startup disk is nearly full, your Mac's performance will degrade considerably. * See our "Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space" FAQ to determine if you have sufficient RAM and free disk space to get the best performance from Mac OS X. * For advice on increasing the available space on your hard drive, see our "Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk" FAQ. While I imagine everyone is impressed the first time they see a window minimized to the Dock with the Genie effect, this entertainment has a performance cost. You can gain some speed by avoiding the eye candy. * Make the Dock less entertaining * Open System Preferences > Dock. * Select Scale Effect in the Minimize Using field. * Deselect the Animate Opening Applications option. * Disable window effects * Tools such as Cocktail and TinkerTool provide options to disable effects, such as zoom and rectangle, that appear when windows and files are opened and closed. The actual settings these utilities change are already available in Mac OS X but are "hidden" as there is currently no provision for changing them in System Preferences. * Avoid using an animated desktop background * While entertaining, an animated desktop background steals cycles from other processes on your Mac. It is better to have a static picture as your desktop background if performance is important. * Skip the iTunes® Visuals * Running iTunes Visuals in the background consumes valuable processor cycles, especially when you are performing other computing tasks. It is not so much displaying the visuals as the computational effort needed to synchronize them with the music in real time that makes them so processor-intensive. * Close nonessential Dashboard Widgets * While Dashboard widgets do not use the CPU unless Dashboard is open, they consume both Real and Virtual Memory (VM) at all times after you open Dashboard. You can see this by reviewing the data for each widget in Activity Monitor. You can reclaim these resources by closing nonessential widgets. To close a widget: * Open Dashboard. * Press and hold the Option key. * Move the mouse pointer over a widget you wish to close. The widget's Close button (X) appears in the upper-left corner of the widget. * Click the widget's Close button. * Repeat steps 3-4 for other widgets you wish to close. Run the Disk Utility > Repair Disk Permissions against your Mac OS X startup disk after any software installation. While I expect the need to do this will diminish in time, one must still be wary of installers that do not reset permissions correctly after an installation. Utilities that constantly monitor your system for performance, automated data recovery, or viruses also use processor cycles. There is an obvious trade-off between these functions and Mac OS X performance. If performance is critical, disable the automatic protection features of such utilities, usually via their Preferences. Loading hundreds or thousands of fonts by default can significantly degrade Mac OS X performance. This is especially true if you use Font Book to install fonts and have not adjusted its preferences: by default, Font Book automatically enables newly-installed fonts. If you have hundreds or more fonts to manage, consider using Font Book or a third-party font-management application to create, enable, or disable font collections when required. See less »

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Tuning Mac OS X Performance

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