How to make Snow Leopard fast again?

Hi Reuben,

All depends what's causing it...
How does it run in Safe Mode? (It will take more time to startup in Safe Mode because it runs a directory check.)



-mj

Try SuperDuper to make a backup, then reformat and restore.
It doesn't copy cache folders from the system but retains yours, and consolidates folders and free space.

If you don't limit or remove browser and application caches, they can grow unwieldy. History, web cache, previews, even bookmarks get cached (so they can be picked up by Spotlight for indexing and search).

And make sure you still have reasonable amount of freed disk space.

A year later and my iMac is running slow. What I'd like to know is, why? What is it that makes Snow Leopard run slower over time?

Nothing normal, that's for sure. If your system is in good working order, it should still run all the same software just the same at the end of its first year as at the beginning. A slow system indicates there's something wrong. What that might be is the question you need to answer, as there are so many possibilities we can't possibly do more than suggest a few. Try referring to the [Mac OS X speed FAQ|http://www.index-site.com/Macosxspeed.html].

See:

Mac Maintenance Quick Assist,
Mac OS X speed FAQ,
Speeding up Macs,
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up,
Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines,
Maintaining OS X, and
Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X .

Deleting caches is supposed to make a difference, if there's a problem with corrupted data in the caches. Sounds like that might be what you had wrong. Cache cleaning is just not something you should do on an everyday basis.

Caches are the most common files being written and updated in most cases, along with some preference files, and of course browser caches can get "out of hand" very easily. But my experience in the past was with system and library (top level) caches being corrupt or a problem or out of date (and flushing them out anytime before making updates to OS X) thru the use of Applejack (was safe, reliable on PowerPC and 10.4.11 and earlier).

Web browser disk cache can cause a lot of disk I/O, and can be slower or slow down a browser when it gets too big, out of control, than if kept to reasonable size, and if you have fast broadband is probably not all that necessary.

Which is why I wish more browser (Safari) would put a limit on space that history, cache, preview to xx days, nn MBs, or just clear on closing.

Scanning a hard drive for problematic files is one thing that any good decent disk maintenance program should be capable of doing, not just the drive indexes and directory.

I like my bookmarks in left side column, and more control.

You can reset, clear, manual go into the three (?) sub-folders
~/Library/Caches/

Safari uses (metadata and anything with safari history, index, cache, bookmarks, preview, etc.

Take a look and see if Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner has a number of features, probably has support for managing Safari.

http://www.northernsoftworks.com/snowleopardcachecleaner.html

Hi Reuben,

to disable TopSites & Coverflow previews in Safari:

Quit Safari

Delete everything in: ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews/

Open Terminal (Applications/Utilities) & paste:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

then hit return & quit Terminal.

To reactivate:

defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy