Increase performance on your Mac!

Optimising Mac OS X performance

RAM, RAM, and more RAM

The thing is, Mac OS X loves RAM. Adding RAM is the best way to improve Mac OS X performance. Install the maximum amount of RAM that your Mac will accept for best performance.

Maintain plenty of free space on your startup disk

Mac OS X makes extensive use of Virtual Memory (VM), which uses up free disk space on your startup disk (your boot volume). If your startup disk is nearly full, your Mac's performance will degrade considerably.

Turn off the eye candy stuff

I know everyone is impressed the first time they see a window minimised to the Dock with the Genie effect, this has a performance cost. You can gain some speed by turning off the eye candy.

• Make the Dock less entertaining
  1. Open System Preferences > Dock.
  2. Select Scale Effect in the Minimise Using field.
  3. De-select 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".
• Avoid using an animated desktop background
• An animated desktop background slows down your Mac by using up sources that would be available to other applications.
• 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 synchronise them with the music in real time that makes them so processor-intensive.
• Close Dashboard Widgets the you will never use.
• 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. 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.

Repair Permissions after installing new software

Run the Disk Utility > Repair Disk Permissions against your Mac OS X startup disk after any software installation.

Disable the automatic protection features of utilities

Utilities that constantly monitor your system for performance, automated data recovery, or viruses also use processor cycles. If performance is important to you, disable the automatic protection features of such utilities, usually via their Preferences.

Disable or remove unnecessary fonts

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.

Perform regular maintenance

While Mac OS X is relatively maintenance-free, by regularly running applications like OnyX to clean your system, you will help assure the best performance from your system.

Some Mac computers can decrease the processors speed to conserve energy. To adjust the processor speed, click Options in System Preferences > Energy Saver and make the appropriate adjustments in the Processor Performance menu. Note that:

• If Options is unavailable in Energy Saver preferences, your Mac does not have this capability.
• If you are using a laptop on battery power, increasing the processor performance will shorten the amount of time you can use the computer at the battery's current state of charge.

Other common performance problems

• "FileVault."
• "Finder."
• "FireWire Problems."
• "Font Book."
• "Hard Drive Sleep."
• "Problems from Insufficient RAM and Free Hard Disk Space."