FINDER TWEAK app speeds up finder significantly!

well, what's wrong with not really wanting to use the terminal? there are people around that aren't *nix gurus, but are using os x anyway ... if i wanted to screw around with terminal all the time, i wouldn't be using a mac, would i? ease of use and a good, simple gui is the backbone of the mac experience. so if you want to use terminal, go ahead, help yourself, but don't poke fun at people who don't... :D
btw, what is a "renice" script anyway?
 
Yeah the last time i installed themes on my mac osx, i lost the whole GUI, with system tweaks im extra careful now!
 
It's just an apple script that modifies the priority level the finder and some other gui components run at.

It could very well be in my head, but it appears to make the finder more responsive. I need to play with it more, but all it really does is send a few terminal commands (and asks for your password... sooo... I'd learn how to do it yourself from the terminal- since at least there you know what's going on).

I think people should be more concerned with whether the script actually makes the finder more responsive, is it all in my head, and whether or not it's a good idea to do this.

Apple's engineers are smart people... I think something like this would be pretty obvious... so I assume it was a rational choice to not put the finder at a higher priority.
 
I've been using it for a day now, with no negative effects but not much noticeable improvement, either.
And I'm not "afraid" of the Terminal by any means, but this little script runs through its 3 commands waaaay faster than I could ever type them out!
:p
 
I too thought nice didn't work. I think we had this conversation. Anyway, I'm not going to re-prioritize my finder. That's hardly the solution I'm looking for. There need to be some fundamental shifts in caching, and use of threading in previews etc. that need to happen, and that's not aftermarket kind of stuff.
 
Well, i'm glad I'm not the only one here who knows about the nice and renice commands... ;)

Now, there is a problem with distributing this kind of software to people who don't understand how it works. I've said the same about the "theme" installer tools (because I used to make themes) and that those tools are not to be trusted. Result? Many people have had to reinstall their system because the end user didn't know what the (unintelligent) installer did.

But I digress.

The problem with this little tool is that you may give too much priority to an app. Yes, OSX has all those protective goodies, but I always try to imagine worst-case scenarious when evaluating system "hacks" like this. What kinds of problems can I imagine? Well, nothing too dangerous, but this can sap away CPU usage from other apps. In the case of a bug in the window manager (or finder or dock), if it has the highest priority, it may completely hog your CPU leaving you stranded. It's fine that the default in this script is -15. IMO, you should never set a priority to -20. In fact, you really shouldn't need to set things farther than -10 since most are 0 by default.

Anyway, I guess if you don't want to use the terminal, this script does its job.
btw, what is a "renice" script anyway?
Click to expand...
Just look in the included code. It simply opens the terminal and executes these commands:
sudo renice -15 -p `ps -ax | grep WindowServer | cut -c1-5 | sort | head -1`
sudo renice -15 -p `ps -ax | grep Finder | cut -c1-5 | sort | head -1`
sudo renice -15 -p `ps -ax | grep Dock | cut -c1-5 | sort | head -1`
Click to expand...
 
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