OnyX for Snow Leopard, How has been your experience with it?

There's no place to enter the admin username along with the password. Any other app that needs admin authentication will ask for both when run in a non-admin account.

I have taken this up with the developer and he says that he sees no need to run it from a non-admin account (despite me having given him the examples) and so he won't fix it.

I never have. Stuff like that shouldn't be done unless you are having some sort of problem; i.e. an app is crashing and you can trace the problem to a bad cache file. If there's no problem, then don't delete any caches. Caches are there for a reason. Deleting them unnecessarily is a waste of time at best, and will make your computer run slower at worst.

You are concerned about 30 MB?

Yes, 30 MB is a negligible amount of space to be appearing and disappearing. Log files get written and rotated, temp files and caches are created and flushed out, etc. This very, very small amount of space that cache, temp, and log files take up is what keeps your Mac running smoothly.

Caches are your friends. Keep them around. They are there to help you. Only cut them loose when they start to turn against you; which in my experience is very infrequently.

No. It is cache files building up. 10MB per day, that's 1GB every 100 days, or 10GB every 1,000 days. On a 500GB drive that's a loss of 2% of hard drive space over almost three years, which is IME about the average length of ownership of a computer.

IMO, giving up 2% of your HD space to caches over the lifetime of your Mac (or only 1% if you have a 1TB drive) +*is not a problem.*+ It is negligible price to pay for having a Mac that is running well. Clearing caches with the intention of recovering hard drive space is "solving" one non-problem by creating a real problem.

Caches are your friends. They are good. They are there to help you. They make your computer run faster. And they do so by taking up an insignificant amount of space. Try to understand that.

To check if the automatic OS X log rotating scripts is talk about in the blog Running the Mac OS X maintenance scripts. The /Applications/Utilities/Terminal code to see when the scripts have run is: ls -al /var/log/*.out

I personally use Yasu (Yet another system Utility). I run it about once every four or five months and after the program does it thing and reboots my Mac, I manually reboot again to completely rebuild the startup/shutdown cache. This keeps my old Mac Book Pro running as well as the day in 2006 when I bought it.

There's no place to enter the admin username along with the password.

D'oh!!! How did I miss that. Of course it doesn't work, then. There's no admin user name to match up to the password.

Really strange that he doesn't see that as a problem. There is too a need to run OnyX from a non admin account. How else are you supposed to change any of a myriad of settings it allows, which are saved only in the active account's preferences, without having to first change an account to admin level?

What about the system and user tabs under "cleaning", how often do you clean the apps cache using OnyX?

As Király noted, there's not much of a need to ever do this. About the only time you would is if you lost power, the Mac completely froze up somehow, etc. In such cases a cache file may have been being written to when it conked out. A damaged/incomplete cache will cause weird issues which the OS or app it belongs to may not be able to fix. Then it would be a good idea to clear them. Otherwise, you're pretty much just wasting your time as cache files change all the time in normal use anyway.

If the space is going anywhere, I would suspect the logs. They will keep growing as you use your Mac. In earlier versions of OS X, the script cleaning tools would run at 2 A.M. (or something like that). But only of course if your Mac was on. Since most users turn their computer off, or let them sleep overnight (the scripts won't run during sleep mode, either), then the scripts never ran and the logs would get huge.

Apple changed the setup for that so if the normally scheduled time to rotate the logs was missed, they would run in the background when they could. Which means most of the time, this should happen anyway, without you even being aware of it. Still, you could try manually running the scripts from OnyX and see how much space you recover. There's no harm at all in doing this any time you want.

As I mentioned above, though, you can clear all the caches if you want, the OS and the apps which use/maintain them will just rebuild them. It will take a day or two for the speed to come back up from a roughly 10-15% drop in performance. A negligible difference, really. And like any cache file, they are all temporary information as caches are always in flux. So removing them entirely only slows things down a bit for a short time.

Exactly!

Kurt, you wrote
"Another very helpful tool in it is to run the Daily, Weekly and Monthly scripts, which don't normally run if you turn your Mac off for the night. These scripts can take up a ton of room on the drive after a long enough period. Even gigabytes."

Well, this was still true, say, about three years ago and three Mac OS X versions back.

Since Leopard the Periodic scripts are taken care of, even in case you shut computer down.
And since Tiger already, they were taken care of in such a way it was really improbable to find oneself with them growing big.

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I was happily using OnyX too. But since a good two years now I don't even have it on my drives, and my Macs still run just as fine as when I was using it.

OnyX might be useful for some special, hidden settings though, I suppose, for those who are lazy with using Google searches when they look for a Terminal command to run.

Hi AxL,

Well, this was still true, say, about three years ago and three Mac OS X versions back.

You didn't read far enough down. 🙂 I wrote just above:

Apple changed the setup for that so if the normally scheduled time to rotate the logs was missed, they would run in the background when they could. Which means most of the time, this should happen anyway, without you even being aware of it. Still, you could try manually running the scripts from OnyX and see how much space you recover. There's no harm at all in doing this any time you want.

Certainly doesn't hurt to repeat it, though.