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OSXFAQ Reader Tips 

Carl's Basic & Advanced Scripts For "Renicing" Your System

OSXFAQ Reader Tip By Carl Bond

You can say I'm no longer a 'newbie' when it comes to using the Terminal.app that comes with Mac OS X . Even though I used this brave new operating system from Apple for many months, I had recently learned that you can give it a speed boost.

The best way to go about this is through the Terminal.app

I have sped up the computer by prioritizing the processes within my system. Every single action, application or service is a process. As shown from the link in this paragraph, processes can either be seen on-screen or it's invisible to the user. Without the Process Viewer or Terminal, the user would not know the process is there.

Further complicating things is that while there may be only one dominant user profile for the computer, there are at least one invisible user running at that same time. Additionally, the processes owned by a user aren't grounded by specific ID numbers. Knowing the ID number is critical to getting the most out of the system.

Sure, one could speed up all the processes owned by the dominant user and slow down all the processes associated by the other invisible users, but if there are several processes (applications or services) from one user that require much processor use, the computer would still slow to a crawl.

So, this is a problem that has plagued many users for some time. It has even plagued me. What does one do, when each time the computer is started up, the most important processes changes their ID numbers.

If a process quits unexpectedly, the ID number of the process may change when it's relaunched, even if the system did not restart. But the priority setting would be back at the default rating. Again, what would be the solution? How would the problem be solved?

Well, the user should learn AppleScript ! The user can order AppleScript to slow down all the processes the user wants, by way of the Terminal ! What's more, the user would start up the script again if some of the programs quit, or the system needs to be restarted. The process would always receive the same priority rating.

I must admit, it's was a steep learning curve for me. I wasn't sure it could be done. I kept falling back to Google to try to search for keywords and key phrases that I knew had to be in the script. I kept going back to what the Terminal's documentation had to say about the command 'renice'. But I eventually got it together, stitching together code from various sources.

Go here to read MORE & get the scripts .... :-)

http://www.carlbond.com/code.html

Enjoy :-)

If you would like to see your tip here send it to us at contribute@osxfaq.com, You could be famous too!!

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