A simple but effective Mac speed-up tip
Here’s a tip I was made aware of recently that I thought I’d share (though I’d like to take credit, I must give that to some Smart Friends of mine); it’ll help speed up your Mac, and may reduce the appearance of the SPOD (the rainbow cursor). It’s not a hack, and there are no modifications necessary to any of your software; there’s nothing to download, and there’s a fringe benefit (subjectively speaking, of course) of cleaning up your Desktop.
The tip: Reduce the number of icons on your Desktop!
That’s it. Really. No, really, try it and see. If you only reduce it by a few, you probably won’t notice much of a difference, but the more you remove, the snappier it will feel (dependent on your machine, of course).
Why? Well, every icon on your Desktop is a little window, and as such, has a corresponding backing store allocation in the window server. Lots of these little windows apparently can put a strain on the window server, especially when you’ve got lots of other (normal) windows open as well.
Don’t believe me? Well, you can see for yourself, by running Quartz Debug found in /Developer -> Applications -> Performance Tools (assuming you have the Developer Tools installed — you do have the Developer Tools installed, don’t you?). Show the window list (Tools -> Show Window List), order by Application, and click on the various Finder entries to highlight each “window.” You’ll soon see that each desktop icon is treated as its very own window. See, I told you so.
No no, no applause necessary, cash donations will suffice…
[robg adds: I thought we had something similar in the archives, but I couldn't find it. Using Quartz Debug was somewhat enlightening for me; I don't have a ton of icons on my Desktop (about 10 or so), but each one clearly uses up a chunk of memory. I didn't notice any speed bump from reducing the number, given the small number I had to begin with. However, I suspect that if your desktop looks like the landing zone for 400 daily flights of icons and folders, then you would see a nice speed bump -- if you fall into this category, and try working with a clean desktop for a bit, please post your experiences.
For those who don't have Xcode (Developer Tools) installed yet, I wrote a very detailed how-to for Macworld a while back...]
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Interesting to note that they may have been right all along.
In general, the fewer resources you use, the more memory you’ll
have for running apps and the less swapping (memory to/from page
file) will occur.
I’ve just looked at this, and while I was paging through the
window list, I discovered that iCal has a _tremendous_ number of
windows open. Does anyone know what it’s doing with all of the
windows (none of which are visible on screen)?
I dont many icons on the desktop but startup takes lot of time.
I clear the logs using macjanitor also but no change. How can i see
which program in startup is taking time?
—
Computer: Powerbook 15″ Titanium 1Ghz 1GB RAM 60Gb HDD SuperDrive
Tiger 10.4.3
I’m curious to hear more discussion.
Oh, and moving things from the Desktop to a folder, and then having
that folder open, is just as bad, if not worse.
Replacing everything with aliases would gain you nothing.
—
Computer: Powerbook 15″ Titanium 1Ghz 512Mb RAM 60Gb HDD SuperDrive
Jaguar 10.2.8
I have about 40 apps on my dock bar, is that too many?
I’ve also been offended at how mdimport seems to get hung up
very easily on .DS_Store files, but I haven’t dug into that issue,
since those files are so easy and undamaging to remove.
Actually, I glossed right over that when editing — I guess the
.
^Ws worked on me, as I mentally erased the words
“…delete as many file from the ~/Library/ as possible…”
Do you mean the User’s Library folder?
Can you be more specific about what files would be safe to delete?
There are so many files and folders in there that look like they’re
essential.
Thanks for this. I had O(400) items on my desktop and I was
beginning to notice the performance hit—even a ball when
selecting an iTunes track, and that’s on a dual G5. I dumped
everything into a junk folder and the machine is notably faster!
Thanks for the hint.
Ben – if you really like to apply the most parsimonious
approach, I’d suggest getting rid of LiteSwitch and just use the
built-in Mac OS X application switcher–unless you actually use the
additional features of LiteSwitch not available in the standard app
switcher: Pressing COMMAND-TAB brings up the switcher, but while
continuing to hold COMMAND, hitting Q will quit the highlighted app
(additionally ` will cycle backward/left and H will hide the app).
No extra software needed. Of course there is that nasty bug
recently noted about the log file in 10.4.3 growing very quickly
for WindowsServer.logfile if you use COMMAND-TAB a lot.
This is something that I have done in the past. I usually have
hundreds of items on my desktop and then I eventually organize it
into a dump folder on the desktop, which now contains almost 600
items.
I also have a lot of open finder windows ~30; I use them as work in
process indicators. Are they bad too? There are so many
finder-helper apps, I’m sort of lost on which one to try out to
help me on that. I guess I’d like tabs, maybe that I could name,
and then the usual finders column-view….
But then, I run MacJanitor (all tasks) and AppleJack (full auto,
all tasks) once per week, need it or not. Just like your car,
preventive maint. is what keeps it running in tip-top shape. I
recommend running the full auto of Applejack just before going to
lunch, though… ; )
It doesn’t matter what type of items are on the Desktop;
whatever they are, they are represented by a window backing store,
which is the issue.
I rotate some sort of slick, hi-res wallpaper every 5 minutes, and
there is still no performance lag.
Can anyone quantify the benefit to be gained by removing icons
from the desktop? (In terms of available memory or processor
performance.)
I’ve got a 3-year-old 15″ Powerbook at work and a brand-new one
at home. I have no performance problems. I have only aliases to two
folders and whatever I happen to be working on at the time on my
desktop.
I’m no expert, but it is my guess that some aliases would make a
difference, especially if you have many of them.
You probably mean you keep an alias of each app. On your
desktop.
You still have a Desktop folder; it’s just not shown on the
screen background. The disadvantage is that you can’t drag things
onto the background. An alternative is a folder action that moves
anything put on the desktop to some other location.
To date the most effective speed up is to delete as many file
from the ~/Library/ as possible.
It’s only drawback is the maximum time interval is 15 minutes. So I
don’t leave it running but run it every couple of weeks.
—
- Ben Rosenthal
Q16 1.25 – Tiger
It probably could be quantified, but I doubt it’ll come down to
43 icons is ok, but 44 will cause you trouble.
Really, (I must say I removed all icons after reading the hint
^_^), it feels faster, but it’s probably just tidier !
Of course, be careful when using rm as it will delete any files
that you tell it to (consult “man rm” and “man crontab,” prior to
doing this).
The finders are annoying because the window/list shows them
un-alphabetized and by clicked-item rather than folder
hierarchy…
Desktop icons are both a nightmare and a convenience. Old NeXT
machines didn’t allow you to put things in the ‘desktop’. Which was
great because it forced you to file your stuff in the right place
from the get go.
Certainly drunkenbatman will benefit from all of this:
You can use this opportunity to treat your computer in a whole
new light. Use the desktop as a temporary storage are instead of a
permanent one. If you empty out the Desktop every night, you will
train yourself to store files in the places they should be
stored.
This was true since 10.1 days. It’s a huge difference, who
doesn’t believe it can check it easily, just create a new user
account and start your normal applications and see the difference.
Off course, the better the machine you have, the speed-up boost is
smaller. Don’t expect miracles. This is especially true for laptops
with slower hard drives.
How do you select solid black?
You people can see your desktops to dump icons onto them? I
allways have to many apps and windows open to see the desktop! I
only see it when i hit f11 or when a software update forces a
reboot!
Oh come on. The guy was running 700 fonts. Okay, maybe you do
too—but I think this “hint” should be qualified
as such.
I also read somewhere that if you use a solid color background
instead of a picture, that can also affect your speed
performance.
Sure, if you have more icons, you have more windows, and you
consume more memory. If this really has an impact on the
performance of your machine, you really need to buy more memory or
get a faster CPU.
Has been hacked? I can’t believe rob would let a
comment like “Well, screw you” appear in a hint on this site!
All generally common sense things, really.
A guy on The Unofficial Apple Weblog says this explanation is
wrong, though:
Does this hint apply to Panther AND Tiger? There are people where I
work (all Panther Macs) that use the desktop as a convenient
dumping ground, and this would be a good hint for them.
I can’t comment on the speed gains, but Panther does have a
separate window for each Desktop Icon.
While my desktop is already uncluttered I noticed with Quartz
Debug that one of the aliases was constantly refreshing (also the
time with seconds indicator and flashing “:” in the menuu bar). So
I removed the alias and placed the original document instead and
the refresh stopped. I also removed the seconds and flashing “:”
from the menu bar.
The WindowServer in most cases is memory bound. That is it trades
computation time for memory because most of the time it is
faster.
For this reason, most applications use buffered windows (there are
other options, non-retained, and retained). That is, for each
window, there will be another window that is off screen. The reason
for this is that when the window the user is interacting with needs
updating (ie, you move the mouse over the window) the WindowServer
simply needs to copy the damaged region from the offscreen window
and blast it over to the visible one. Similarly when the content of
your window changes, applications are only supposed to update the
region that changed. This drawing is performed on the buffer, which
then is copied over to the ‘visible’ window.
I just posted a reply — there’s no way that the size of the
files represented by the icon makes any difference at all! OS X
doesn’t care how large something is until it’s opened. But each
file added to the desktop is one more thing the OS must track.
Quitting the Finder will give you a nice boost as well — saves
the Window Server the trouble of drawing the Finder layer on top of
the background image. I ran Let1kWindowsBloom repeatedly with and
without the Finder running, and benched between 10% and 15%
difference in speed…
It automatically moves everything on your desktop to the location
of you choice.
well, it seems to use between 20-50k per icon (see kBytes column
in Quartz debug). So if you have 100 icons, you’d save at most 5
megabytes of memory. woohoo, err that’s not much.
Now we’d need to compare the refresh rate (or time spent drawing
the desktop) when say a window is moved on top of the desktop when
there are 1 or 100 icons.
I bet you’ll only see a few % difference in CPU usage in Activity
Monitor. At most.
Most of it is saved in quartz’s buffers anyway, only the revealed
regions need to be redrawn.
So you’d have to count : comparing 100 rects (not much), then
drawing n icons (not much (remember the icons are already loaded
(ok they may be swapped))).
And a realted hint – the default download folder for Safari, and
often for other internet apps, is the Desktop. Create a download
folder off the Desktop and set it in Safari. Keeps things tidy,
especially in light of this hint.
I’d often wondered what on earth WindowServer was doing using up
so much space/cpu!!! Thank you!
I’ve been using an app called Tidy-it.app since 2001 With a push
of the jpg button and all jpgs on my desktop are moved to a folder
called jpg’s on your desktop. press another button and all those
files are organized. It trips over a few file types and reports
that they do not exist. But, it gets enough of the common types to
be useful.
So keep desktop clean, clear out the Dock of little used apps,
don’t use dashboard, etc.
If I hadn’t stumbled on a footnote to a post at drunkenblog,
I never would have gone down that route. I have probably lost Apple
at least fifty sales when various clients saw my PowerBook, said
they were planning on buying one, and then cringed in horror when I
exploded out of my seat to tell them now slow they are, and that
it’s a horrible mistake to buy one.
If this was an XP issue people would be foaming at the mouth. But
let us not criticize the esteemed macintosh.
Yeah, I’ve had a “junk drawer” in my Dock for a long time that I
dump crap into. I also have a “WEB URLs” folder in the dock for
those, too. Both have custom icons. Recently, I’ve gone solid blue
on my desktop, although solid black is apparantly the bet way to
go.
I recently moved to using the full 128px icon size – gotta have
the full effect of my cute Sumomo HD icon ^_^ I never was much for
too many things on my desktop, but this keeps me on my toes.
What about USING ALIASES OF FOLDERS on the Desktop instead of
the original folders? Does it affect performance? Because if it
does not affect performence, then it is AS SIMPLE AS REPLACING THE
FOLDERS on the Desltop WITH THEIR ALIAS FOLDER!
I spent a while doing this, and when I emptied the trash it said it
was deleting 20,000+ files. This was from all caches, preferences
etc.
My uninformed clients always used to “think” that an cluttered
desktop would make the computer slow. I argued it simply would make
the computer harder to navigate and use — but seeing as the
Desktop is a folder like any other, it technically wouldn’t make a
difference in available CPU speed.
And this is exactly the problem with the PowerBooks. I have a
1.67Ghz G4, I can’t buy a faster CPU. I have 2GB RAM, I can’t buy
more RAM. All I can do to get acceptable performance while using
the Desktop is to upgrade to a G5, which is not extremely portable,
despite the handles.
I completely agree. Why would Apple design a feature that
convenient to be so performance crippling.
It was clearly in there as a joke, but since it could offend some,
I’ve now removed it. Thanks for the heads up…
“Well MacOSXHints has it wrong. Sorry guys, what is slowing down
your machines is the size of the Desktop memory being used up and
having to hit the swap file. If you have one file @ 500 MB on your
Desktop or 50 files @ 1K which one is going to use more memory to
load the desktop?”
To do this set up a cron script to automatically delete it every
night at around 2 am.
After that my machine performed MUCH better. I know this shouldn’t
make a difference, but it was the best thing I ever did.
I have no doubt that breaking the symmetry of treating all icons
(desktop or not) as windows would necessitate some hacks. It might
not be as elegant. However, if treating icons as windows causes
such a performance hit that using the Desktop extensively cripples
a late-model Powerbook, then something is amiss. Though I keep my
own Desktop uncluttered, you shouldn’t *have* to. After all, the
metaphor in play here is of a desktop – a place, where you,
uh, put stuff.