Cool Mac Gear• iPod Video • iPod nano • iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Garageband |
I'm still trying to sleuth a out why my Mac gradually slows to a crawl after several days booted in OS X. When first started up, performance is reasonably brisk, although much slower than in OS 9. However, by the second day, things begin to slow down markedly, and by day three, have usually slowed to the point of unusability. A reboot restores performance, but that kind of defeats the advantages of OS X's vaunted stability. This phenomenon only manifested after I installed Jaguar. I once went six weeks without a restart in OS 10.1.x, and slowdown over time was never an issue with 10.1. It is obviously not a general problem with OS 10.2.x either, or there would be a chorus of complaints, but a few other Jaguar users have reported the same behavior. It has been suggested that a lack of free space on my OS X partition might be the culprit, but I have been keeping about 1000 MB free, which is not optimal, but should not get eaten up by the swap file in a day. However, I was thinking last evening that file fragmentation might be contributing to the generally lackluster performance I'm getting from Jager. I read somewhere a while back that OS X tends to fragment hard drives faster than the Classic OS did. I had never run Norton Speed Disk (a component of Norton SystemWorks, ne้ Norton Utilities) on my OS X partition, so I decided to give it a shot. I ran Speed Disk from OS 9, which on my computer is on a different partition from OS X. If you have an unpartitioned drive or only the OS X version of SystemWorks, you would need to boot from the SystemWorks CD I guess. Using OS 9 for this kind of maintenance work is one of the reasons I'm partial to dual-booting. The way Speed Disk works is to read large portions of file data into RAM, then erase sections of the disk gradually, and rewrite the data in an orderly fashion in file contiguous blocks from the top level on down. This can result in a modest speed improvements, but I was hoping that getting the free space into a single unfragmented block might also help the swap file to work more efficiently. Anyway, Speed Disk pronounced fragmentation on my OSX partition to be "severe," even though "only" 1,415 out of a total of 98,689 files were fragmented, amounting to just 0.8%. Perhaps more significantly, available free space was scattered into 5,966 fragments, 8.8 MB being the largest. Here's what the fragmentation map looked like: 
I then ran the Speed Disk optimization function, which took more than half an hour to defrag my 4 MB OS X partition (containing 3 MB of data). When it was finished, the file organization map looked like this: 
Much more neat and tidy, anyway. I haven't been running long enough yet since the defragmentation to determine whether it will help with the gradual slowdown problem, but my first impression upon restarting in OS X and starting up ViaVoice to dictate this column, is that ViaVoice launched in about one-third the time it has been taking recently. That's an encouraging sign. Captain FTP launched in about one quarter the time it's been taking lately, and overal Finder performance seems snappier. On the other hand, I'm not noticing any speedup launching Classic Mode and Classic apps., which are on other partitions that I did not defragment. There is one form of absolute security to Mac OS X From anonymous Charles, Not for the weak at heart, or those at all likely to lose their passwords. It is called a Firmware password. And Mac OS X Jaguar disks include a way of doing this. Warning, once set, you are forever endowed with the responsibility to remember your own password and keep it somewhere safe. Forget the password, and you won't be able to get back in your computer unless you swap out the motherboard itself. This is in response to your security letter from John Martellaro on http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2002/12/20021217115221.shtml
This article shows you how:
Sincerely,
From Egil Helland
Hi there,
Hi Egil;
Right you are. I somehow missed that. Thanks for the correction.
However, after checking it out I still don't find it as slick as the Mozilla/Netscape version. There seems to be no way to have a page open in a new tab window simply by Command-clicking a URL. Am I mistaken? Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
|
Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
| ||||||
|
| ||||||||
