11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance

3/14/2007 in Utility by face | No comments

11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance:

9. Keep an Eye on Activity Monitor There may be other things hogging your processor’s attention or sucking up RAM. How will you know about them? By using Apple’s Activity Monitor, which comes with OS X. Activity Monitor will tell you about CPU usage, RAM requirements, virtual memory usage, and whether a given application is a PowerPC or Intel (Universal) build. Check it occasionally to see if there are any red flags - or keep it running for a few days (with one of the useful Dock icons or floating windows enabled) to keep an eye on when things are spiking.

It’s a fine idea, but could be part of the problem.

I have been running Activity Monitor quite constantly since late January.

the underlying “pmtool” loses memory. a lot of memory. It starts off consuming just over 1MB of “real memory” (1.4MB).

After 18 hours that will be about 80MB of real memory. So if limited memory is the problem, and you keep it running for a few days, well…