kmosx: SPEEDING UP Mac OS X for G3 Macs

Performance Tuning Mac OS X
by Romeo B. Mariano, M.D. (doctorcool@mac.com)

The following are performance tuning techniques to speed up Mac OS X for use on a G3 Mac. Of course, they will speed up G4 Macs.

? REDUCE NUMBER OF COLORS ON THE DISPLAY. Set the display to thousands of colors via the Displays System Preference. This is O.K. so long as you don't do Photoshop work. This reduces the work OS X has to do to present graphics on the screen.

? REDUCE RESOLUTION OF DISPLAY. Set this via the Displays System Preference. This again reduces the work OS X has to do to render graphics on the screen. I set my resolution to 1024 x 768, which is fine for most purposes, as well as being easier on the eyes to read. Game players use framerates to gauge their machine's performance. At fewer colors, and lower resolution, the framerates usually increase tremendously.

? DISABLE TRANSPARENCY. Transparency is beautiful. But it is a performance hog, particularly on a G3 processor. It also clutters up the interface. Selecting a menu item is more difficult when the menu is over text. Unfortunately, transparency cannot be toggled off system-wide in the Aqua interface. To accomplish this, I installed a theme other than Aqua to remove transparency.

I use the theme "Grey Aqua" from Diamond Meadows at http://homepage.mac.com/c__c/
installed using a program called "Duality3 from http://conundrumsoft.com.

Duality3 does a function similar to the Appearance manager of Mac OS 9 or a Mac OS 9 application called Kaleidoscope. By removing transparency, menus have more "pop" when selected. The user interface is much cleaner without background distractions. The developer of "Grey Aqua" has other themes for Mac OS X to try out.

? DISABLE FONT SMOOTHING. Font smoothing is a performance hog. Font smoothing takes out the "snap" from Mac OS 9. It does this greatly to Mac OS X too. Disable font smoothing via a free program called

"Tinkertool" from http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool2.html

You may find that scrolling in Mac OS X becomes close to as fast as Mac OS 9 when font smoothing is disabled. With Tinkertool, you can even keep font smoothing, but set it only for fonts larger than 36 points, thus preventing smoothing on the more commonly used smaller font sizes.

When I first tried to disable font smoothing, I found that text did not render well. Letters ran into each other on the screen and when I tried to print text. I thought it was a bug in font rendering so I placed this technique on the shelf. Recently however it was discovered that Internet Explorer had installed corrupted versions of the Arial and Times New Roman fonts during the default Mac OS X installation. Thus you have to first REPLACE the Arial and Times New Roman fonts in Mac OS X with the updated versions from

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm

Use a program called

"XRay" from http://www.brockerhoff.net/

to make sure the permission settings of these fonts are corretly set when you replace them. The owner should be "Root". I'm surprised Apple hasn't update these corrupted fonts that OS X installs.

? ENABLE WINDOW COMPRESSION. Mac OS X saves each application's window as a separate layer in memory the size of your screen. When redrawing the screen, OS X has to retrieve the data for each window. Unfortunatelly, the data for each window can take up a lot of memory. For a 1024 x 768 display with millions of colors, each window open can take up to 2.2 megabytes of memory. This is a lot of data to retrieve each time windows are redrawn, such as by simply bringing a window to the front. This of course slows down OS X. The window data can be compressed however, speeding up screen redraws because the compressed window data can be retrieved much faster than the uncompressed data. Unfortunately, window compression is turned off by default, when you install Mac OS X. To correct this, I use a free program called

"WinCompressX" from http://homepage.mac.com/kendals/FileSharing3.html

to turn it on. This has greatly improved window redrawing speed in Mac OS X. (I believe a future update to OS X will have window compression enabled by default). It makes dragging windows fun again.

? INCREASE THE PRIORITY OF IMPORTANT PROCESSES. Mac OS X will give more attention to certain programs/processes - if you tell it to. This may speed up performance of that process. For example, you may want to increase the priority of the Window Server (a system process) or the priority of the Finder or the priority of the Print Manager. I use a free application (which installs its own menubar icon) called

"Process Wizard 1.0" from http://www.theinteractivething.com/index/lng/en/menu/products/p/products/

to do this. It lists all the applications and background processes on your machine and allows you to select individual ones to prioritize. Otherwise, you have to manually do this in the Terminal window with a command called "renice".

? SPEED UP YOUR MOUSE AND KEYBOARD. The problem of "preemptive multitasking" operating systems such as Mac OS X or Windows XP is that "preemptive multitasking" reduces the computers attention to your actions. Mac OS 9 devotes most of its attention to your actions - mouse clicks, key presses, etc. If you hold a menu down, the machine grinds to a halt waiting for your decision. But Mac OS X may have a delay when it is paying attention to other programs or processes which are running in the background. Thus there is a delay when you press the mouse button or key before something happens. To increase the attention Mac OS X devotes to your actions, in the system preferences, increase your mouse tracking speed, increase your key repeat rate and shorten the delay until repeat for your keyboard. This makes the machine much more reponsive to your input because it has to pay more attention to you.

? TURN OFF UNNECESSARY EXTENSIONS IN CLASSIC. This includes graphics driver extensions, network extensions, and CD/DVD drivers which are redundant and not used in MAC OS X. To do this, select the Extensions Manager Control Panel in the Mac OS 9 System Folder. Select "Mac OS 9.2.2 base" to get a basic set of extensions. Then further reduce this by deselecting the ATI or NVIDIA drivers and other extensions that are redundant with the Mac OS X ones. This technique greatly speeds up loading of Classic - to less than a minute on a 500 MHz G3. And this also greatly speeds up Classic since these extensions are no longer running in the background taking up CPU time.

? CHANGE DOCK MINIMIZER EFFECT TO "SCALE" RATHER THAN "GENIE". Set this in the Dock Preferences. The Genie effect takes more horsepower to render than the Scale effect, thus slowing down your machine.

? GET MORE RAM. Mac OS X is more memory intensive than Mac OS 9. This is illustrated by its relatively inefficient storage of window information in RAM. More RAM equals more speed. Mac OS X also is less likely to use virtual memory (saving RAM data on the hard drive) when you have a lot of RAM. Virtual memory is slow compared RAM memory - even in as efficient a memory management system as in Mac OS X. RAM is cheap.

? GET A FASTER HARD DRIVE. When I replaced the original 12 GB hard drive on my Pismo, with a 48 GB 5400 RPM IBM Travelstar, the speed increase was remarkable. Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and many programs such as Photoshop use the hard drive frequently. A faster hard drive greatly improves performance. Photoshop redrawing is much faster with a faster hard drive. Hard drives are much so much less expensive than a couple of years ago, it behooves you to purchase an upgrade if you have an older system. If you have a desktop, a RAID Hard drive system is even faster.

? RUN A SECOND MONITOR. A quirk I found on my Pismo G3 laptop is that screen redraws seem to speed up when I attach a second monitor running at 1024 x 768, and run a dual monitor desktop configuration. It feels snappier than by using the laptop's LCD screen alone. Go figure.... Perhaps this is a quirk in the ATI graphics chip of the Laptop. Perhaps this may also work for you. The speed up doesn't occur at higher monitor resolutions for me.

These speed tweeks have greatly improved the "snappiness" of Mac OS X without removing much of the flavor or feel of the operating system in my G3 processor Mac.

These performance tuning techniques have sped up Mac OS X so much for me that I can wait until Apple comes out with a dual G5 processor or 1.5 to 2 GHz dual G4 before I purchase a new Mac.

For database application use, which does not use Altivec, the most important factor in performance is the clockspeed of the processor - thus a 1 GHz G4 is only twice as fast as a 500 MHz G3. This is not a large enough performance increase to warrant purchasing a new machine. A four-fold performance increase is more noticeable and preferable.

The following additions to Mac OS X will further add features in Mac OS 9 to improve its efficiency and appease those of us with ingrained habits in Mac OS 9:

? ASM from http://asm.vercruesse.de
- adds the Application Selection Menu to the upper right of the Menu Bar

? FruitMenu from http://www.unsanity.com
- adds your own customizable Apple Menu

? WindowShade X from http://www.unsanity.com/
- adds the windowshade minimizer effect

? DropDrawers X from http://www.sigsoftware.com
- adds pop-up tabbed windows to organize your files and launch applications.

These and the other applications can be obtained via www.VersionTracker.com

My main computer is a Powerbook 2000 (Pismo) with a G3 processor. It is the workhorse I use on the job, despite having 12 other computers including Athlon equipped PCs and a Titanium G4 Powerbook. It's main advantage over the Titanium is the expansion bay for a second hard drive or a second battery for extended use. I attach it to a Mitsubishi 2040u 21-inch monitor and a customized external Microsoft Internet Pro split-key keyboard (modified to definitely prevent carpal tunnel syndrome despite writing 2000 pages a month) with Microsoft Explorer Optical Trackball.

When Mac OS X 10.1 came out, I installed it and loved it. But it was too slow for daily use. I continued to use Mac OS 9.2.2. As the new year approached, with the growing excitement of more software being available for OS X, the release of the Mac OS X 10.1.2 upgrade, and with the frustration of crashes taking down Mac OS 9.2 - which risked mission-critical data loss, I decided to see what can be done to improve OS X so that I could use it daily at work.