Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Sloppy programming' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Sloppy programming
Authored by: gerti on Jul 28, '05 01:43:08PM

This is an rather alarming trend showing in many OS X applications: Caches that speed up an application under certain situations, but cause grief down the road or when the environment is different than that of the programmer.

First of all Caches should NOT be in the home directory, as that can be network mounted. This appears to have been completely overlooked by Apple's engineers. For example the latest Mail.app is near useless if a user has large IMAP mailboxes and a home that lives on an NFS share.

Then there apparently are many caches where no limits are applied. They are allowed to grow in the wild, eventually slowing down an application instead of speeding it up. And fault tolerance appears to be poor: A corrupted cache (for example due to an application crash) are not recognized as such, causing any number of unwanted results.

The number of applications affected by this is growing rapidly: Safari, Mail, Dock, Finder, SystemUIServer, iPhoto, Spotlight, SystemPreferences. Just to mention a few where caches have given me (and many other users) grief in the recent past.

All of this is a clear sign to me that the majority of the developers at Apple are bright young kids with limited experience. They may get quick results, but lack the experience of seasoned developers to see the 'big picture'.

OS X is on the fast track to become like Windows: To keep it running smooth, you'll have to do a clean install every now and then, which mainly has the effect of getting rid of old or unmanageable caches. And you better keep it simple, and only use it in very common types of environments. Anything a bit more complex apparently is not been tested at Apple, and the developers lack the foresight to account for those conditions.

Sad really...



[ Reply to This | # ]
Sloppy programming
Authored by: henryhbk on Jul 28, '05 04:36:14PM

You could use Cocktail to handle cache cleanup. It does a really nice job of cleaning all the caches (as well as running system maintenance off hours).

---
Henry Feldman, MD
Medical Informatics
NYU School of Medicine



[ Reply to This | # ]
Sloppy programming
Authored by: thejester on Jul 28, '05 05:05:12PM

I am not an expert, relying on graphical interface tools to try and solve Mac problems (one day I'll try to learn Unix!!). I have helped friends whose Macs have slowed down in numerous ways by clearing all caches using Onyx. It seems to clear out anything that may be troublesome when too bloated or somehow corrupted. I have had excellent results getting these (mainly G4) machines back up to speed.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Sloppy programming
Authored by: FenrisUlf on Jul 28, '05 11:54:26PM

I think we're way off from becoming Windows-like in that regard. There is no mysterious, corruptible, bloated, unresponsive registry in OS X. I've got a G4 running panther that has never been reinstalled. It runs snappy as the day I put panther on it. (And had the DeathStar drive not died on me, it'd have been an "upgrade" install...)

Flush your cache periodically, and you'll never have to reinstall. You can never say that about Windows. And most of the time, it's Windows' fault. :)


---
---
Who are you that walk across the graves of giants at this late hour?



[ Reply to This | # ]