How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 05, 2003 7:54 AM |
voxxdigital |
Ok, I realized that OS X 10.2.0 was a LOT faster and responsive than OS X 10.2.6, which I'm currently using. This was discussed in a previous thread. I'm using a PM9600/Sonnet G3/400/512, 320MB RAM, 80G UW-SCSI3 with an adaptor to fit the old built-in SCSI (all slots full). PCI slots are: 1-Pro Tools card #1 2-Pro Tools card #2 3-Pro Tools card #3 4-Realtek Ehternet card 5-USB-2/Firewire combo card 6-ATI Rage Orion 128 display card. As I mentioned before, when I first installed OS X 10.2.0, it felt as snappy and responsive as OS 9, really. Now that it was updated to 10.2.6, it feels as sluggish as a Performa running OS 9. I thought about keeping 10.2.0 version, but my USB-2 hard drive won't work with a version previous than 10.2.4. I'm very disappointed. I read about some "tricks" to spped up OS X in xlr8yourmac.com, but they really didn't seem to be effective. Anyone here knows how to really speed up Jaguar? I mean, safely disabling background (useless, in some cases) processes? I noticed that the most security updates as I apply, the slower is the system. I run "repair permissions" within Disk Utility, but all I got was a speed up about, say, 5%. When I installed OS X 10.2.0, I used to click the "System Preferences" icon in the Dock and System Preferences app lauched almost immediately. After updating to OSX 10.2.6, the icon bounces about 18 times in the Dock, then spinning wheel, then launchs the app. After repair permissions, the icon bounces "only" 10 times in the Dock and no spinning wheel, but still unacceptable. Any ideas? |
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G4 |
October, 06, 2003 12:40 AM |
lyonsdj88 |
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Get a G4 with a 50mhz bus and make sure all your ram is 60ns and say 512mb. Also a 2mb L3 should help or at least 1mb L2. Seems that 10.2.6 or 10.2.8 put alot more stress on the bandwith of bus+ram+video. Radeon 9000 should help the GUI some and more L2 would help the "wait states" in that old EDO or FBM ram. Remember that the slowest ram speed of a "supported" mac is 66mhz that's 15ns and best we can get is 60ns+matched sets for about 20% better. I've tryed all the things listed here none of them seem any faster to me, so it may be time for faster HW. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6?cjsconfections |
October, 04, 2003 6:58 AM |
jseibyl |
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Thanks for the links.....Cocktail works well for me, with of of my goofy costimizations, gotta love Candy Bar, Visage, and TinkerTool ;- ), but I will take a look at Jag Cache cleaner. With regard to what cocktail clears.... I wish they their help or interface was a little more selective in what caches it removes and what they are. I assume it is EVERYTHING (IE, SYSTEM, USER, etc) The Help does not give any info, just the generic stuff. I do know that there are three Cron scripts it runs. The Daily is for removal of scratch files, backup of NetData, and rotation of system log. The weekly is to rebuild datatases of sherlock and the find it type stuff, and removal of misc logs. The Monthly is login accounting and rotation of the wtmp log file. Psynch, LOVE it. Combined with CCcloner a VERY powerful little set of tools, THANKS for the info, always looking for a more twekable matenience tool.... Jim |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 03, 2003 6:41 PM |
cjsconfections |
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My point on pulling the cards is that an update may have changed the way that X handles your kernel extensions and the pci cards themselves. I can get my system to lock during the boot process, slow down, or run just fine by switching the pci slot on my usb card. When I installed 10.1.5 my ATI Orion card would only run in the top 3 slots. If I put it in the lower slots nothing would happen. No boot at all. Now with 10.2 it will run in any of the slots. I don't know why but that is what happened to me. 6 slot macs have always been weird anyway. As for the utilities, They are all from VersionTracker http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ (sorry, I don't know how to make these clickable on this forum) Jag cache cleaner- cleans caches, repair permissions, controlled cleaning of caches. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16494 Cocktail- Does a lot more than Jag cache cleaner but on my system, broke some links to dock items, broke preferences, and I have no idea what caches it is cleaning. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18282 Carbon Cloner- simple efficient and exact copy of your Jag volume. Use the older version for pre 10.2. It is how I found the next utility. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13260 And my new love of life for Shareware- PsyncX- No instructions (repeat- he has no instructions on how to use it) but after clicking around it worked first time for me. I back up on hard drives (I have 5 on my 9600). PsyncX will update a file, folder or entire hard drive. I had cloned a my working volume of Jag (10.2.5) a couple of months ago. I ran PsyncX and it updated it right down to the desktop picture, which I had changed, and e mails that I had sent that morning. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16089 By the way, I never am the first one to try a piece of shareware. Let it get debugged for a whild and read the reviews. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 03, 2003 5:08 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Where do I download any of these, for God's sake??? |
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cjsconfections |
October, 03, 2003 4:55 PM |
jseibyl |
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Hey, I use Cocktail on a regular basis, seems to do okay for me..... what makes jag cache cleaner better for you, and where can I get it to play???? Interested to hear your opinion..... Jim |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 03, 2003 4:53 PM |
jseibyl |
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Yup, don't mess with the money-makers. I most certainly understand where you are coming from! My primary machine has been locked down for quite a while now. Road story.....When I moved about 1 1/2 years ago, I brought and set up my systems EXACTLY as I had them. One thing that changed was the faulty power in the Condo I moved into which I didn't know about, I tested the line, for faults, etc, but didn't think about long term fluctuations in voltage. I had one backup batery that worked fine before....after 3 months of working, the machine just went nuts. After freaking out, as I had a BIG job I was working on, of course, I crack open the case to find several of the capacitors on the logic board to be leaking. I had to replace the mobo and get the machine going for the deadline, barely made it, but didn't get much sleep that week. I learned a BIG lesson there about not messing with some stuff. I got some voltage stabilizers (from me knoweledge of photo/darkroom equipment) and have not messed with that sucker since. Funny how the those hi end cards ARE the most delicate....Interesting they are recommended for the first slots......wonder what the difference is between the "primary" PCI bus and the "secondary"...especially since the Radeon card seems to work best in slot 6. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 03, 2003 4:08 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Hey Jim, That's a point. But the further I can go is swapping display/USB-FW/ethernet cards. I thought about it and decided that I WON'T touch Pro Tools cards, since I make my living from them and the're strictly recommended to be placed in the first slots. Besides of that, there is the danger of taking out and in very delicate PCI cards as Pro Tools are, in such an old system. Pro Tools is VERY picky about oxydated contacts. cjsconfections, That's interesting. Where I get Jag Cache Cleaner? As for taking out the PCI cards, the system was running fast with them (and their drivers) with OS X 10.2.0. If any bottleneck appeared from 10.2.0 to 10.2.6 it may be more likely as Jim said about Win98. But I can try, anyway. And about the floppy, unfortunately I still depend on OS 9, since my Pro Tools cards are as "old world" as my 9600 and they won't run in OS X. Pro Tools plug-ins uses those irritating authorization floppy disks, so in case of defragmentation of OS 9 HD or any need to re-install, I must keep the floppy drive. But it's a good idea in case I upgrade my cards. I was evein thinking about replacing the floppy for an internal firewire card reader some day. |
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Another thought |
October, 03, 2003 12:07 PM |
cjsconfections |
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While you are at it with the side cover off, unplug the floppy. Having at one time put in an extension to activate the floppy, your machine may be looking for the floppy and waiting for it. They are worthless in X anyway. I took mine out and have another hard drive sitting there. With the slot of the floppy open, it is a great place to put any hard drive that runs hot since the power supply will pull air through the slot and cool the hd. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 03, 2003 12:01 PM |
cjsconfections |
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Vox, A few more thoughts; Just for shits and giggles, pull the usb/firewire card and the ethernet card and boot. See if it helps. On my 9600 I have gotten to the point of being able to do that in a couple of minutes. I don't even shut the side of the case for testing. You might also try booting into Safe Mode by pressing shift after the chime but before the Apple logo. It will run fsck, then load only Apple extensions. It takes longer to boot because of this but, again it only takes a few minutes. If that solves your problem, it is likely an extension or piece of hardware (or a hardware/extension combo) that is causing the problem. Also, I just re-read this thread and did not see if you have used any cache trashing utilities. If you have, ignore the rest of this post. I have used Jag Cache Cleaner and Coctail and like the first better than the second. I always repair permissions before trashing caches as well. My sisters Ti laptop was choking itself and I had her run Jag Cache Cleaner running maintenance scripts first, then repair permissions then deep clean system logs and user logs. It takes about 15 minutes on my machine (similar to yours) but took 2 hours on hers. But it fixed the problems. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 03, 2003 10:16 AM |
jseibyl |
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Yeah, I understand.......if you do get around to trying to move the cards, keed the even/odd relationship in mind. The PCI standard is cross platform and it might work for us with MACs since the hardware is basically the same. Even if you are doing a "small" upgrade from 10.2 to 10.2.6, the calls from the OS to the PCI hardware via the system BIOS could be "improved" enough that it could cause a bottleneck....I saw that going from win 95 to win 98 a VERY long time ago. I like to forget that time ;-). "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" hmmm...I heard that somewhere....;-) Jim |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 03, 2003 9:21 AM |
voxxdigital |
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Hey Jim, I will try to shuffle some PCI cards as soon as I get some free time to do it. The 9600 is thge centerpiece for my work, and I can't do much experiments with it. The first three slots are occupied with the Pro Tools cards, and those can't be moved from there or they will be unstable. The fourth slot has a 100base-T card, the fifth a USB-2/FW combo card and the Radeon 7000 is the lowest card. Remember, OS X 10.2.0 worked fast with that configuration, and OS 9 screams! As for the CPU, It's just too much trouble to mess with this system and re-install in another just for test. And it can run faster or slower for a thousand of reasons. In this case, my rule is: if it's not broken, don't fix it!! ;-) |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 02, 2003 12:28 PM |
jseibyl |
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Hey Vox! Have you tried that upgrade chip in another mac, just to see if you are getting the same inconsistencies in L2 reporting?? The PCI card shuffle is an old windoze trick. ;-) When one of those machines boots up, the BIOS assigns IRQ numbers (interupt requests) to each SLOT that tell the logic board how and when to handle requests for each of the PCI cards. On a Windoze box the odd numbered slots can share IRQ numbers and the EVEN number slots can share a single IRQ. Usually this works okay, but with some "special" PCI cards, or bandwidth intensive cards, like a video editing board, a shared IRQ can cause either performance downgrade OR system lockup. My windoze video machine has a pinnacle DV 500 video board, and it HAS to have a NON-shared IRQ or it bombs the entire machine. I assume that macs do the same thing, as we have flashed windoze PCI cards, etc, but I have no way of knowing what the mac equivilent of an IRQ is. Going on this logic, it might help to move them around and see what happens. Jim |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 02, 2003 11:59 AM |
voxxdigital |
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cjsconfections, Thanks for the tip. Altough I need every PCI card I have plugged in, I'll try change the position of some cards. Besides, I noticed the difference between versions with all PCI and USB devices plugged in in both OS X versions. Paul, As for the cache, I got some software reporting 256k, and some other software reporting 512k, which makes me even more confused... |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
October, 01, 2003 9:48 PM |
paul_findley |
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First, if you have 512k cache, and you are only seeing 256k enabled, that would suggest a rather serious and most likely problem. I'd get the powerlogix cache enabler, that let's you play with the cache in real time, not just at boot up. Second, I would get rid of the Quartz Extreme, because it has been reported to slow down some things, while speeding up others. The most improvement you'll get from that is a few % anyway. Third, I'd get rid of the swim driver. No use taking a chance on crappy stuff that doesn't work. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 30, 2003 3:05 PM |
cjsconfections |
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Vox, It seems that you have tried most of the stuff that makes our systems work well but a few things that I noticed about your system gave me another idea. Several times that I have tried to install equipment that wasn't happy with my system, I noticed that the spinning pizza wheel and the bouncing icons became unacceptable. Equipment that has choked my system has been; scsi scanner, usb/parallel cable, usb card reader, various printers and so on. I noticed that you have usb 2. Try taking out the card and see if performance improves. Then go on to any pci cards or peripherals added after you installed 10.2. Sometimes I have had to swap around pci cards to get better performance. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 23, 2003 9:05 AM |
voxxdigital |
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"update", typo (blush)... |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 23, 2003 7:51 AM |
jseibyl |
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It seems that the update combo is the ticket, Pacifist does INDEED seem to help in forcing prebinding on the system. With regard to the swim driver, great idea, wish it worked. On my system, it is PAINFULLY slow to the point of unusability, and it hosed several floppies in the process, I have removed it, but it has not really interferred with the performance of the system, unless I put a floppy in. Good to be back...... :-) |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 23, 2003 6:16 AM |
voxxdigital |
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I think it's safe to install the swim driver, altough I never made it to work properly. What I did and it gave me some speed improvement, was to re-install the 10.2.6 combo putdate (standalone) over the current 10.2.6. It improved speed about 40% in general tasks (System Preferences bounced only 4 times in the Dock before launch). Another little utility that may help you is the "Pacifist" (www.versiontracker.com), it can force to update all the prebind information of your system. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 22, 2003 11:19 PM |
insightinmind |
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For some reason (bored that my system was now working fine), I tried to install the floppy drive extension suggested by an old posting on OWC ... SWIM3 thing ... my OS 10.2.6 system began choking, and everything "ran" slower ... I trashed the swim3.kext file, hoping that removed it from my system ... oh ... i'm looking at digital pianos, and the older ones available have floppy drives ... anyway, my system config is PowerPC 8500/180 with a Sonnet Crescendo G4/450/ 225/1MB, Sonnet Trio with 2 ATA drives (Seagate 60, 80), and an ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition with QE activated ... any comments welcomed ... realizing this is an old thread ... i noticed a slow down with the latest updates from apple ... i'm thinking the internet is bogging down ... |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? - Ryan, Marty |
September, 09, 2003 5:40 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Ryan, thanks for the reply. It seems I asked for your help by the time you were typing... I will try to do the 10.2.6 combo update over the current systems to see what happens. Throttle is already set at zero, and it seems to have no difference. One weird thing is that System profiler shows "256k" as L2 cache size, when the actual size is 512k. Processor speed and bus are showed correctly. Marty, Well, it really feels as if the cache were disabled or something like it. L2CacheConfig shows "L2 Cache Enabled", but it certainly feels "disabled". As I said, my PM7300 with original PPC604/200 processor feels even more snappy running OSX 10.1.5 than the 9600 running Jaguar with the G3/400. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 09, 2003 5:27 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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In my experience 10.2.6 is pretty much the same as 10.2, but might be a bit snappier. What you are describing sounds like a misconfigured/not configured L2 cache setup... I would use Ryan's L2Cache config, and verify the cache is properly enabled. I am also running several 6 slot macs (PTP and 9500) both of which did NOT suffer any slow down in going from 10.2 to 10.2.6 I bet it's the cache. Marty |
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RE: Ryan, please, some help would be appreciated!! |
September, 09, 2003 5:15 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Ryan, please, I've tried almost everything. I'm quite frustrated. No, it's not about you, XPF is really great, it's OS X related. Any help will be realy appreciated. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 09, 2003 5:13 PM |
OSXGuru |
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One other thing you might check is the "throttle" setting in XPostFacto. In theory, that setting should not slow down your computer after the early part of the boot process is finished, but there are a few odd combinations of events that might cause the slowdown to persist. If this is the case, you would see the wrong clock speed for the CPU in the System Profiler. You could try changing the "throttle" to "none" in case that helps. You could also take a look at the system.log (/var/log/system.log) to see whether there is any clue there as to what the problem is. (For instance, some log message that gets repeated a lot). Also, the point that someone made about the combo updater is a good one-- apparently, the combo updater sometimes solves problems introduced by the "incremental" upgrader. |
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RE: How to speed up OS X 10.2.6? |
September, 09, 2003 1:01 PM |
voxxdigital |
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I tried "System Optimizer", from Version Tracker, and all I got was to slow down the system even more. But I will try this other one. I will also check the processes and post here. |
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