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A small collection of performance hints
Authored by: rickg17 on Apr 07, '03 04:55:01PM

The amount of RAM you have will not materially affect your CPU usage. CPU usage should be in the single or low double digits if the system is idling with no open apps. To fix this, open the Terminal and type "top -u" (no quotes of course). This orders the results in decreasing CPU %. Watch this for awhile and see 1) what the split between system CPU usage and user CPU usage is and 2) what things are at the top (no pun intended) of the list when CPU is spiked. I'm betting you have one thing that is behaving badly. Rememeber that top itself sucks up andf 10% of CPU so use it sparingly...



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A small collection of performance hints
Authored by: ptwithy on Apr 11, '03 07:53:23AM

You can make top suck less by adding '-s 10' to mean poll every 10 seconds instead of the default 2. Also, hitting space while in top will cause it to update immediately.

If you don't go for the Terminal, Process Viewer is a GUI front-end on top.

This is handy for finding Carbon apps that are still polling in their idle loop, and hence wasting CPU cycles. Quit them when you are not using them.



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