Cleaning up by restart

bigbluebigblue
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Some people I know almost never shut their Mac down. Now, OSX defrags and 'cleans' (?) itself each time you restart. I also noticed that the computer restarts slightly faster when you restart more regularly than when you don't.

Sooo ... good idea to shut your computer down at the end of the day to keep him lean and clean ?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    jwink3101jwink3101 Posts: 739member
    If i remember another post correctly, OS X (really the UNIX core) defrags instantaneously not just at restarts. Also it supposedly gets "better and faster" with longer use. When you use a program, it does not restore the ram after closing. When the computer needs that ram it will release it RIGHT AWAY but if you don't end up needing it, apps start much faster.



    Also, i have heard that UNIX will start to "learn" how you use your memory and give priority to what is released first. I may be wrong about that.



    This is just what i remember reading. I may not be right.



    But, I do know for a fact that when i am restoring a disk image in VPC, it is much faster as you restore and save it more but once you reboot, it slows again.



    I personally do not shut-down just because i have a laptop and i need it active as soon as i open it. Having it sleep uses very little battery power (maybe 1-3% an hour) so i just sleep it on my commute and then recharge during lunch or classes where i don't use it.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    toweltowel Posts: 1,479member
    On my iBook I find that while apps launch certainly faster the second time, I get a lot more VM disk-churning the longer I go between reboots, the more apps I launch and quit, and the smaller my free HD space gets. It gets rather annoying after a couple of weeks, with lots of beach-ball-spinning when I switch to a "stale" app. Rebooting clears out all the disk caches (over a GB's worth sometimes) and lets memory allocation start afresh. If I had more RAM (384MB), an emptier HD (rarely more than 2GB/20 free), or a faster HD, the churning would be a lot less noticable. So I reboot my iBook every week or two, or whenever I think of it.



    In contrast, our DualG4 workstations suffer from none of my iBook's limitations (1GB RAM, fast and huge HDs), and I have never felt the need to reboot those between system updates.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    nijiniji Posts: 288member
    it is true that any mac running os x runs better if you leave it on, shutting down only occasionally. cursors zip up menus faster, disk searches run faster, programs open faster.

    however, there is a diminishing returns law in effect as well.

    which you can see for yrself by getting tech tool 4 and defragging (optimizing), and then doing a permissions repair, and then leaving yr machine on so that it can do its daily, weekly, and monthly maintainence scripts, or, getting a utility like mac sweeper and forcing them to run. yr machine will run even faster after you do all these.

    defragging and forced re-binding makes it run even faster.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    randycat99randycat99 Posts: 1,919member
    Oh man- you said the "d" word, and now you will be chewed out... Run away while you can!



    Regarding the iBook uptimes, my personal experience, as well, suggests that 1 week is about as much as I can expect before a refreshing reboot achieves benefits over just keeping it on. The installed RAM is already max'd out, but after a week, you see a lot of paging, app response slowdown, and disk thrashing rearing its ugly head. I could just quit/restart all the memory hogging apps I have kept running during that time (*cough*safari*cough*), but if I am doing that, I might as well just restart the whole damn thing and really get refreshed. Safari, Xfactor, and Mail seem to be the main violators in my system that exhibit gradual responsiveness degradation (forget about resizing windows- I just avoid it like the plague now). As far as I can tell, there is no rogue process with a memory leak to speak of in all of this. It just gets real pokey after a weeks worth of use.



    On a similar note, I had a real juicy topic a while ago asking about "memory fragmentation" as a contributor to performance degradation in OSX, but it got zapped into the unknown before AI forum could store it (much to my chagrin). Feel free to expound on the topic if there is any relevance...
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