Have you read the article in this week's TidBITs? Very interesting.
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-686.html#lnk3>
One thing it told me I didn't know, which helps explains something I've
observed. I've said to someone recently, maybe to you, that I've found that
a quick way to get performance back in Entourage is to duplicate my identity
folder in Finder, and then remove the original (put it in the trash or move
it to another partition) and rename the copy to be the active folder.
As a final step, be sure to empty your trash. Entourage has a nasty habit of
continuing to use the old copy of the database even after you've trashed it.
If it won't delete from the trash, you may need to close the "database
daemon" process and try again. To close the daemon, you can use Process
Viewer to kill "Microsoft Database Daemon," or you can execute a one-line
script from Script Editor:
tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to quit
The reason this helps, I've surmised, is that it tends to defragment the
file. The article says that the Mac file system is configured to
automatically look first for a contiguous chunk of free space when copying a
file. If it can't find one large enough it takes the largest it can find,
then next largest, and so on. If you have a fair percentage of free space on
your disk, such copies almost always result in contiguous files.
It also says that e-mail databases, because of the almost constant changes,
tend to be the most fragmented files. That coincides with my observations
that, when Entourage gets slow, duplicating the identity's files gives a
notable performance boost. It also explains why defragmenting the entire
disk does not seem to improve performance for much other than Entourage!
This also explains, in my opinion, why some people swear by rebuilding the
database periodically, claiming it benefits performance. They'd get the same
boost from just making a duplicate.
The only other application I've noticed getting a boost after defragmenting
is FileMaker Pro, in the very large databases I use to archive my e-mail
messages. Again, frequent changes are the culprit; I archive once a day, and
have over 21000 messages in my archive currently, and growing. Same thing
helps there, just duplicating the file, deleting the original and renaming
the duplicate like the original.
Bottom line seems to be, defragmenting the entire disk does not really help
much. Far better just to occasionally duplicate any files that are very
large and frequently updated (with additions and deletions; in-place
modifications won't affect fragmentation).
The one area in which I am not sure I agree with the article's conclusions
is in regard to system swap files. OS X depends on some rather large swap
files. It can easily create a gigabyte of swap files (in chunks of about 800
MB, I believe) during a long period of uptime, running many different
applications. If you don't have about a gig's worth of 800 MB chunks lying
around, you will probably end up with some fragmented swap files. For a
time, I operated OS X from a 1.5 GB partition (something I learned is not a
good idea). I had about 700 MB of total free space on that partition; my
swap files got really badly fragmented. When that happened, my system slowed
to a crawl. Just restarting was like being reborn. Defragging the disk
frequently helped delay the inevitable slowdown and give me a much longer
workable uptime, although it did not prevent the eventual degradation.
So, if you are operating your OS X system on a small partition, get off it
if you possibly can and run from a large partition with a lot of free space.
If you can't get to a larger partition (as is the case on my tangerine
iBook, with only 4 GB on its hard drive), disk defragmentation may still be
necessary. Other than that, it appears that regularly duplicating your
large, active files, replacing the originals with the (defragmented)
duplicates, is all the defragmentation you will need on OS X.
--
Microsoft MVP for Entourage/OE/Word (MVPs are volunteers)
Allen Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Entourage FAQ site:
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
AppleScripts for Outlook Express and Entourage:
<http://members.thinkaccess.net/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/Scripts/>
Entourage Help Pages: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
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