[G4] Slow Preformance

[Alex]

On Thursday, Apr 15, 2004, at 19:26 Canada/Eastern, Snow White wrote:

> And you could download a program called Pacifist from 
> versiontracker.com and run it to adjust your pre-binding.  
> Pre-bindings are like a short cut for the system to launch programs 
> more efficiently, but run your Disk Utility first, from your install 
> CD and repair your disk untill it reports no errors and then repair 
> permisions and then run Pacifist for the pre-binding.

Hm. Close, but I'm not sure it amounts to a cigar.

Prebinding (essentially, resolving the addresses of code morsels before 
the application or framework actually looks for them at launch time) 
improves launch time -- and that's it. It can be of no help at all with 
sluggish performance of such applications as iMovie.

Prebinding -- which has to be redone each time a code library is 
updated -- is done at the installation or update of the OS (during the 
"optimization" phase), one of the limitations being that only 
applications on the boot volume are prebound. Note that -- for various 
reasons -- not all applications can be prebound.

Does the user in OS X v10.2.x or later need to update prebindings 
manually (i.e., using 3rd party apps like Pacifist or Cocktail or 
Apple's redo_prebinding or update_prebinding tools)?

No. Whenever a prebound app with out-of-date prebinding is detected, 
the OS makes a note of it, then, after one or two launch cycles (to 
allow the app to install libraries it might need) it automatically runs 
fix_prebinding.

If you really need to redo prebindings, you are probably having some 
serious problems. Fixing the disk(s) and reinstalling the OS is 
probably a safer (and, in the long run, probably more efficient) 
solution.

f