OS X Code (r,s)

Posted on Monday 10 October 2005 - Popularity: 2%

By default Mac OS X gives all processes an equal priority, doesn’t matter if it’s the frontmost (active) application or one in the background. Normally if you don’t have to run a CPU intensive application in the background, like a web server for example, this default setting isn’t exactly optimal; it would be better if the frontmost application gets the highest priority.

Speed Freak (in the lower half of the linked page) is a nice little application that reprioritizes applications for you so that the frontmost application always gets the highest priority. Speed Freak accomplishes this through the Unix “renice” command.

Now don’t expect huge speed boosts as a higher priority, for example 25%, doesn’t mean that your frontmost application runs 25% faster, it just means that the app gets a higher priority. This way other applications in the background can’t slow down the frontmost application as easily. An other thing to have in mind is that things like the GPU or network access are not accelerated this way, so don’t expect to see games run faster or web pages to load in less time.

Fredi

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