[X-Unix] Disk & System maintenance

[Mullany, Ryan]

Try utilities like Onyx and Cocktail for prebinding and other useful system
optimisation.

Defragmenting is generally not necessary in OSX.

Cheers

Ryan M.


On 28/10/04 3:49 pm, "Eric Crist" <ecrist at secure-computing.net> wrote:

> 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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