How can I make my Mac Pro as quick as it used to be?

I have the same machine. After ML my machine was a bit slow but I used Disk Warrior 4.4 from another OS to defrag my main drive. It now starts like it used to. I think it's a shame that installing ML OS frags the drive but it seems to. Also, repair disk permissions. Other ways to speed up is to turn off some features but I'm not experienced enough to tell you where they are all located in prefs. Good luck

Just clone the System boot drive

Isolate, move, account sub folders of media files etc to another drive

Could also do a clean install to a drive, rule out the OS and boot drive and see how itbehaves and whether it is hardware.

Upgrade to Snow Leopard. Lion offers no benefits.

LiorP wrote:

Hello!

Let me begin by saying I have an 8-core Mac Pro, produced in Mid 2010. I run 10.7.5 OSX on it...

After it's finished booting, does your Mac go back to being as fast as it used to be or is it still pokey? 10.7.5 has introduced some severe conflicts between Spotlight and Time Machine, resulting in, among other things, some endless threads on the Lion Forum about the two threatening to run for years to finish a backup and/or index. That activity uses up CPU cycles and RAM and slows everything else down.

BTW, Disk Warrior doesn't defrag a HD; it cleans up and repairs just the directory of the HD.

Gary Brandt-

I hate to break it to you, but Disk Warrior 4.4 does not contain any ability to defragment FILES. The only de-fragmentation it does is to re-order the DIRECTORY. That lovely colored graph is a graph of items out-of-order in the DIRECTORY, not files in fragments on the drive.

An optimized directory will give you slightly faster results when initially searching for file information, but is unlikely to give you appreciable speedups when working with the files themselves. Your perceived speedup must be caused by something else.

Mac OS X defragments large files automatically as you use them.

I have 6 gigs of RAM in it, so I feel like there's no where to go with that, or at least - I don't need any more.

Don't be so quick to assume you would not benefit from more.

Use this article to take a quick look at your RAM while you have your typical Applications open:

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

How Much total RAM is in the Pie?

How much of the pie is Green ?

How much is Green + Blue?

How many Page Outs since last restart?

How much Swap Used ?

It is what I call "under-nourished" or starved, believe me, I have 6 gigs of RAM is not feeding the beast very well.

8-core means you have 8 DIMM slots and want 12-24GB, 24-48GB for CS5/6 for instance.

Make sure you do not allow the primary scratch to default to the boot drive, you probably don't but might want to make sure.

MHz still "rule" and a 6-core 3.33GHz was and is the faster sweet spot, only a few apps are so well tuned and optimized that dual cpu and more cores, but even then unless you have 2.93GHz 8-core and are dealing with 2.4GHz, that makes a difference.

Does Pro Tools off load to the GPU using CUDA? if so there could be hope in the form of GTX.

http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/mac-optimization-guide-for-osx-10-6 -snow-leopard/

http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Troubleshooting/en349739

http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/How_To/Upgrading-to-Mac-OS-10-8?retURL= %2Farticles%2Fen_US%2FTroubleshooting%2Fen349739&popup=true

OK I used the wrong term and stand corrected but the fact is the graph shows a terribly disturbed data graph saying it's 37% <whatever> after you install ML and the machine boots twice as fast after you run DW and 1% <whatever> so who cares? It has to be doing something important. As I said in my original post, There are things I don't know and I admit it. I'm not a tech, just a user like the poster and this wrks for me every time AFA speed of system. Just sayin...

Gary Brandt wrote:

OK I used the wrong term and stand corrected but the fact is the graph shows a terribly disturbed data graph saying it's 37% <whatever> after you install ML and the machine boots twice as fast after you run DW and 1% <whatever> so who cares? It has to be doing something important. As I said in my original post, There are things I don't know and I admit it. I'm not a tech, just a user like the poster and this wrks for me every time AFA speed of system. Just sayin...

Different problems have different solutions and the starting point of finding a solution is agreement on common terms.

As it happens, I've been using DiskWarrior since it was first released and swear by it. Optimizing the directory of a HD can make a difference in performance and I do that regularly too. Upgrading an OS can cause directory fragmentation but ordinary use over time can too. But while I heartily recommend it, it's not free so I'd offer free solutions first, after it's clear what the problem actually is. Since the release of the 10.7.5 update, many people have been complaining about endless indexing and backing up (see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4324046?start=0&tstart=0) and a side effect if that is slowing down everything else. And the indexing processes start running during the boot process which I suspect the 10.7.5 problems simply aggravate. Indeed, I've turned Spotlight off altogether and was surprised that booting sped up noticeably.

I don't see any processes in there from Pro Tools, would help to know what it uses.

Disk Warrior does help. But then so does keeping the boot drive to 50% free too, the amount of free space a drive has matters. The way free space is fragmented and the size of any free fragments. And of course how old a drive is affects how it performs.

Boot drive ~ keep it to just the OS and apps and to have a lot of free space and a fast drive.

Data and media or project files and drives used also matter and whether single drives or arrays, audio libraries tend to do very well with SSDs, while in the past high end systems used SCSI and Fibre Channel arrays, with the intent of reducing latency and seeks and optimizing how many concurrent IOs could be achieved.

Please launch Pro Tools or whatever you typically have open when you are doing your most intense work and characterize that set-up.

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The best performance payback for Mac Pro is to have a Boot Drive, with only the system, Library, Applications, and hidden unix files like paging/swap. A separate boot drive greatly simplifies Mac OS X upgrades as well, since your User files do not have to be involved.

User files are moved off to another drive. Then the systems constant "snacking" from the boot drive does not move the read/write heads on your data drives. Everything goes faster.

Japamac's Blog: Make room for performance -- Moving the Home Folder

NON system / apps moved to another drive,

You can for convenience leave ~/Library which is your home account library which is about 1GB

leave that stuff where it is, and move the system to another drive.

use it as is for a backup for now

Your system uses then about 250GB total - there has to be 40GB or more just for the system to play with, to burn a DVD, temp files and other things.

Boot drive

audio libraries

projects and media files

scratch

backup

... that would be a common setup for storage.

OS X can and does often use 1GB for kernel, Safari can take up as much. But some of the way a modern OS works is if you give it more, if it has more RAM or memory to work with, it will. So sometimes you can go from 3GB to 6GB and find it using as much as it can grab and then some.

OS X and some programs have had trouble releasing pages from memory even after closing windows, quitting apps.

In some cases repair permissions will force pages to be freed, in other cases only more RAM and sometimes a restart. Varies by program.

I was looking for a recommended minimum, and then for what people actually find is needed for best - maybe the Pro apps forums like the one for Logic Pro and others on Apple Community. And depend on particular users and projects of course as to how many concurrent tracks and processes that they tend to work with.