Clean install means fast boot?
The quest for speed goes on and having messed around with RAID block sizes I was about to give up and put my system back the way it was. Then I came across an article which said that they had experienced much faster performance from a clean install. A few Google searches returned a more blog and forum posts stating the same thing. As with all of my previous experiments there was only one way to find out.
My current system
It’s a Mac G4 DP 1Ghz with 2GB of RAM. A scsi 2 disk raid stripe running Mac OSX 10.4.11. An Adaptec 39160 (Mac Version) running the scsi drives. Striping done with Disk Utility with the default 32K block size. It’s a five year old machine and rather than buy a new one just yet I want to squeeze out as much performance as I can from this beast and run it till it dies or becomes obsolete. The IDE drive that came with it is not that bad, scsi is faster and scsi raid is faster still. But can I eek out even more speed?
This machine originally came with Jaguar 10.2 and it had OS 9 dual boot. I did use OS 9 occasionally but when I went on to Panther 10.3 the apps I ran in OS 9 had come out on OS X. So OS 9 became redundant to me. When Tiger 10.4 came out I upgraded to that. Leopard is out now but I haven’t made the jump just yet. It’s still only at 10.5.2 so early days.
I’ve basically hopped from drive to drive using CCC or Carbon Copy Cloner and I’m fairly happy with the current set up. And having done that all the files from previous installs have come along too. So even if I don’t get more speed there ought to be some clutter clearance.
The process
I backed everything up and read all the help file on the subject of a clean install. I realised that it might take a while so I did it on a free evening. I booted from the Tiger install DVD and went for the Erase and Install option. I crossed my fingers and clicked OK. And then followed the instructions. I did something that messed up the whole process and was kicking myself later on. But it’s easy to see things in hindsight. When I created a new user, I used the same name as my current user. So when it came to the time to migrate user accounts there was a user name conflict. I had to make up a new user name for my current user and that really messed things up. My wife’s account on the other hand was exactly as it had been. Then I had to install all the updates and I was eventually back to where I was without the clutter. Great! Or was it?
Everything that I had installed via Terminal looked as though it had gone. I’m pretty useless at all that sudo bash unix scripting but I can copy and paste. So all the stuff that I had installed for my Ruby on Rails work was gone. MySQL was gone. (MySQL had created a user account for itself and thankfully that was gone too.) I would have to reinstall XCode and X11 and start again. No worries. But was it any faster? Hmmm. Not sure. If there was a speed boost then it was very slight and with my user settings all messed up I wasn’t happy. There wasn’t a significant increase in speed and I didn’t feel at home so I put all back the way it was.
Splitting System and Data Files
With another experiment failed you’d think I’d be ready to give up on my quest for speed when I came across another article on MacGurus about splitting the system and data files over two drives or partitions. They claimed that this would mean more speed. I thought I’d break up my raid stripe and try again. There were fairly complex instructions, for my level of experience, with the creation of symlinks and whatnot but I soldiered on. I won’t go into the details of the process but I made a bit of a mess and eventually got it all to work. And was there more speed? Not at all. Reading other articles on the subject I found that some reported more speed and others not. So again I recreated my raid stripe from backup using CCC to put it back the way that it was. Home again.
What next I hear you ask
It’ll be time for Leopard very soon and when that time comes I will certainly do a clean install. It looks as though Ruby on Rails is much easier to set up on there anyway.
New monitor
An interesting side issue occurred during all of this experimentation, my monitor died. So I got my other one which was usually hooked up to my xbox and installed it. My old one had an ADC connector and this one has a DVI. Widescreen; cool. And there was something else that I noticed - the system boots faster! What do you know.