On Aug 21, 2010, at 5:55 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> i think tools like MainMenu are a bane on Mac users; to put it simply, they
> profit on FUD -- for example this statement on their site:
>
> "Clean caches to improve application performance, rebuild your Spotlight
> library for faster search, and repair disk permissions for faster disk
> access."
>
> okay, so caches slow applications down? i suppose it can happen, but in
> general caches speed things up (why have them otherwise?) and deleting them
> actually slows things down in the short term (without even considering the
> time spent "cleaning" then rebooting)
>
> deleting the spotlight "library" then waiting several hours for the index to
> rebuild, on the uncertain prospect that it will save a few seconds -- great
> strategy
This argument would be true if all the above mechanisms were implemented 100%
correctly and suffered from no data rot or corruption problems. But the fact
is that it's easy to get a corrupt or inefficient Spotlight database that is
way slower than one that is freshly rebuilt; and after months (or sometimes
years) of use, it's worth deep-cleaning the system caches to get some boot
speed back. The Spotlight problem was particularly bad on ~1GHz machines
running Tiger and Leopard. Often you would get a single character or two into
Spotlight and then your keyboard input would completely lock up while Spotlight
tryed to find every single file in your machine that had a "th" (or whatever)
in it. Rebuilding the Spotlight database cured this syndrome reliably.
--
Macs R We -- Personal Macintosh Service and Support
in the Wickenburg and far Northwest Valley Areas.
http://macsrwe.com
_______________________________________________
MacOSX-talk mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
