A fix for system slowness with locally-run Server

Feb 14, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

This may help you out if you are running any server version of OSX on a desktop machine and are experiencing extreme slowness while starting new programs. I installed Tiger server on my desktop machine and was running into unexplained creeping slowness with applications. It turned out to be related to a memory hogging program that Server runs by default, called Web Performance Cache, or webperfcache (name of the program).

webperfcache performs a very useful function if you are serving web pages on the internet and want really high performance. It caches static web pages in memory to accomplish this, which is great if you're a web company, but is generally unnecessary for home use. The problem is it forces these pages to stay resident in memory, and has a negative impact on OS X's memory paging and swapping routines. Long story short, turning it off drastically improved the performance of my G4, and it might help you out, too, if you're the kind of person who runs Server at home as a graphical desktop.

To disable it, go into the Server Admin program (under Applications/Server) and click on the local node (your computer's name) under Computers and Services. Then select the Web service, and under this the Settings tab. There is an Options tab under settings that controls optional web server components. You should uncheck Web Performance Cache here and save your settings.

It can be re-enabled by checking this box again, but I can't see why anyone would need to.

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