So I was having trouble watching The Office on hulu the other night due to an extremely slow network connection, but then I decided to look closely at my network traffic for a little while and see what I was actually sending/receiving.  This was very enlightening.  Excited about the information I found, I decided to also see which processes on my computer might be slowing down my machine.  This is what I came up with – a pretty good list of things you can do to speed up your Internet and your computer in general.

There are some simple things you can do, like disabling drop-shadows using ShadowKiller and manually running maintenance scripts that might not have run automatically when they were supposed to.  There are a bunch of tips for speeding up specific applications (Safari, Firefox, Mail, iCal, Office, iTunes, iPhoto, etc), but this isn’t exactly what I am interested in.

The first thing to do is open Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor and see if there are any processes that are taking up an insane amount of CPU.  This has been known to happen with Quicksilver and other system processes. If you find one that looks fishy, google it!

Most of the suggestions from Why is OSX so damn slow? on ask.metafilter are covered here.

Spotlight

I use Quicksilver, so I don’t need Spotlight constantly indexing my computer.  Completely Disable Spotlight Someone please tell me if there is another reason I should keep Spotlight enabled…
sudo su
chmod 0000 /Library/Spotlight
chmod 0000 /System/Library/Spotlight
chmod 0000 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle
chmod 0000 /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Spotlight.prefPane
chmod 0000 /System/Library/Services/Spotlight.service
chmod 0000 /System/Library/Contextual Menu Items/SpotlightCM.plugin
chmod 0000 /System/Library/StartupItems/Metadata
chmod 0000 /usr/bin/mdimport
chmod 0000 /usr/bin/mdcheckschema
chmod 0000 /usr/bin/mdfind
chmod 0000 /usr/bin/mdls
chmod 0000 /usr/bin/mdutil
chmod 0000 /usr/bin/md

After a reboot, open a new Terminal and do sudo su to make a root shell, then:

rm -r /.Spotlight-V100
rm -r /private/var/tmp/mds
exit

If you do want to completely disable Spotlight, you can also just rebuild the Spotlight index.

sudo mdutil -avE


Dashboard

Also in the category of “extraneous processes” is dashboard.  I never use it, so why should it be running all of the time?

Disable Dashboard

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock

To re-enable it:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO 

If you are really hard core, you can also disable the Dock.  I am considering doing this.

Cups

I noticed that a process called ‘cups’ was making TONS of requests on my local network. CUPS is “the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS X and other UNIX-like operating systems.” via discussions.apple.com

To see the list of services running on your machine:

sudo launchctl list

You should see org.cups.cupsd in there. To disable it:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.cups.cupsd.plist

To re-enable it:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.cups.cupsd.plist

You can run ‘sudo launchctl list’ again to see if org.cups.cupsd is there or not.

Bonjour

While I was looking at my network traffic, the other process that was making tons of requests was another process:  mDNSResponder. Turns out this is Bonjour was polling the network for friends to connect to. So, if you don’t use Bonjour (for file sharing, in iChat, printers, etc), you can disable Bonjour.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

To turn it back on, just do the opposite:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist