[X-Unix] Disk & System maintenance

[Eric Crist]

On Oct 28, 2004, at 2:49 AM, Mark Philip wrote:

> Hi all,
> With OSX 10.2, other than the CRON utility, are there other utilities 
> that can optimise the system and disks?
>
> Specifically:
>
> 1) Tuning overall system performance
> 2) Defragmenting the hard disk (I used to do this on Windows 
> machines). Is this now necessary on OSX?
>
> --
> Best,
> Mark.

The cron utility is not a disk optimization program, rather it is a 
scheduling daemon.  From the cron(8) man page:

Cron searches /var/cron/tabs for crontab files which are named after
      accounts in /etc/passwd; crontabs found are loaded into memory.  
Cron
      also searches for /etc/crontab which is in a different format (see
      crontab(5)).  Cron then wakes up every minute, examining all stored
      crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be run in the 
current
      minute.  When executing commands, any output is mailed to the 
owner of
      the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment 
variable in
      the crontab, if such exists).

      Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool 
directory's
      modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab) has changed, and if it 
has, cron
      will then examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those 
which have
      changed.  Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab file 
is mod-
      ified.  Note that the crontab(1) command updates the modtime of 
the spool
      directory whenever it changes a crontab.

As far as your questions into tuning system performance and 
de-fragmenting the hard disk,  Apple is of the opinion that you 
generally don't need to defragment your hard drive if you are running 
OS X 10.2 or higher:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Generally, you could purchase the Norton suite of software to tune your 
system for you, but simply adding RAM is the best thing you could do to 
improve performance.

HTH

-----
Eric F Crist
Secure Computing Networks
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