“Is your Mac starting up slower than it used to?” Jonny Evans asks for Apple Must. “Have you already run Disk Utility to check the condition of your machine, and it seems to be OK?”
“You may have some applications, server connections and background processes that launch whenever you login to your user account on your Mac. It speeds up start-up time if you get rid of those if you no longer need them. To do so, open System Preferences > Users & Groups, and select Login items,” Evans writes. “To get rid of one or more of the login items you might have installed, select them and then click the minus icon.”
“Macs need a certain amount of clear storage capacity to run at their best,” Evans writes. “As a rule of thumb, you should leave around 10 percent free.”
More tips in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We can’t count the number of Macs to which we’ve applied some or all of these tips which lead to faster start-ups and better performance overall.
If you want to have an even deeper look, download a copy of LaunchControl. This is an excellent GUI for the Mac launchd component and lets you see what launch agents and launch daemons are running when you boot that aren’t covered by login items.
$10. Thanks for pointing out LaunchControl.
I’m used to digging around in Library folders and sorting through launch agents and daemons what I want and what I do not. But there is even more 3rd party stuff loading that can be causing problems. I hope this app helps make the thrashing about into something simpler.
Thanks
“Macs need a certain amount of clear storage capacity to run at their best,” Evans writes. “As a rule of thumb, you should leave around 10 percent free.”
This is terrible advice that’s been given for a very long time now. A better rule of thumb is to take the amount of RAM you have and double that to determine how much drive space you should have free as a minimum.
Think about this for a moment…
Startup volumes can easily be anywhere from 128GB to 10TB on a modern Mac. Leaving 10% free on a 10TB volume would equate to 1TB, but the system isn’t doing anything differently on that 10TB drive than it is on the 128GB drive.
Your Mac needs to write RAM to disk, and if the space isn’t available, it needs to compress that data. That’s why if you go below that threshold, things start to really slow down.
The 10% of disk space was a myth that had some legitimacy in the beginning when things were more balanced (between RAM and disk space) and back when fragmentation was an issue.
But of course my brother’s brand new (2017) iMac runs slower than his ancient (2007?) iMac … because the new one came with a 5400 drive, and we’d installed an SSD in his old one last year.
Its 2018 and Apple is still lowballing their “premium” experience with the slowest drives they can find.
Shame.
You made the choice, it tells you what your getting when you ordered.. If you weren’t a cheapskate, you’d have a 2017 Mac with a screaming SSD in it…
…which doesn’t neglect the fact that Apple uses slower/cheaper hard drives yet still charges a high price (>1000) for their least-expensive iMac.
Agreed.
Plus ‘Macinfo’ had a bit of a reading comprehension failure: it wasn’t one of my machines (which have all had SSD’s since 2009), but my not-so-tech-savvy brother’s who still has his rose-tinted glasses on for All Things Apple.
Sounds like the kind of knunty move from Fred the Head.
• If you’re running a Mac from an actual hard drive, including the use of a Fusion drive, it’s still very useful to occasionally defragment. (It’s not useful with an SSD drive).
• It’s important to regularly run at least DiskUtility on your boot drive. Restart with Command-R held down to get to it for repairing a boot drive. This includes when you’re using an SSD.
• Running further repair utilities is, I find, critical. I wish it wasn’t, but DiskUtility is remarkably lame compared to the likes of DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro and Drive Genius. Sadly, the mess Apple has made of the roll out of their new Apple File System, APFS, means that these third party tools aren’t yet entirely able to repair an APFS volume. TechTool Pro v9.6 is the first to offer initial 10.13.x High Sierra APFS repair functionality. We’re still waiting for the other tools to catch up. Do to this ongoing problem as well as the incompatibility of APFS with Fusion drives, I’ve found it wise to NOT upgrade to High Sierra. Waiting…
*drumming*fingers*on*table* 🙁
Repair: “DUE to this ongoing problem…”