Stripping away unnecessary parts of macOS?

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alexdingley
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Stripping away unnecessary parts of macOS?

Post by alexdingley » Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:30 am

Hi there — this is definitely more of a "Mac" question than it is a recording question, but I'm guessing that there's someone on this board who's either succeeded in doing this or (at least) experimented with it. Has anyone here made deeeeep tweaks to their macOS to remove unnecessary background applications, in order to speed up the ability of the machine to run their DAW / Plug-ins, etc? My machine is running fine, but I'm just thinking about how I can get even more years out of my 2013 Black Cylinder Mac Pro.

I really enjoy my Mac (and the many Macs I had before this one), and I love macOS (for the most part). It's just that I worked for Apple for ~8yrs... and on either side of that tenure, I've seen a lot of incremental changes to the OS over the last 2 decades. So many of them are great, while I feel like there's got to be some that are chewing up resources in a way that doesn't make my machine any better at being a recording deck.

back in macOS 9 (and earlier), I remember folks use to really easily strip away unwanted extensions (I think that people used to even have "extension sets" that they'd choose to load on boot, so that they could have the machine be "excellent for audio" in one boot-up and "tweaked for photoshop" on a different boot-up. So I'm curious if anyone out there has done stuff to suppress all of the nifty background syncing and potentially-bandwidth-hogging daemons and applications that are standard in the os, these days. Any really notable performance boosts? Any horror stories?

All of this is coming from a weekend experiment in which I took a 2011 MacBook Pro (which can't even run the last 3 versions of macOS) and installed Ubuntu linux on it for a few days — loading some of my day-job web-sites / very dense database systems went SO MUCH FASTER on this 2011 quad-core i7 (under linux) than it did on my 2016 MacBook Pro (under a modern macOS)... so it occurs to me that if mimicking the lower-overhead of a "less sync-y" operating system would get me more instances of Fabfilter, then... it's worth some tinkering.

and YES: I know that I should backup my system drive before doing anything like this. I would likely create a separate volume with an experimental install. (one of the nice things about APFS drive formats... no need to partition to create a separate "hard drive" volume.)

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Nick Sevilla
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Re: Stripping away unnecessary parts of macOS?

Post by Nick Sevilla » Mon Aug 09, 2021 6:01 am

I used to do this...

Typically, you need to look at what things your mac is running in the background all the time, or at least part time,
and are things you do not need, nor the Mac needs.

Like, you installed some software that you now never use... toss it.

Especially if it does use background processes for, say, internet etc.

The utility app Activity Monitor is where you want to look for these things.

You set it to looks at "user" processes. Remove unwanted apps and their extensions. I do this by doing a finder search for the app and its active extensions, and then turning them off in Activity Monitor, and erasing them.

From Catalina on my laptop, I really do not see many operating system things I do not use. And I have erased software that I no longer needed. If I ever need those again, I can install them to be used for a time and then remove again.

Once I do delete stuff, I REBOOT, and also use Onyx to change and clean up permissions and other things that are important but invisible.

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frans_13
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Re: Stripping away unnecessary parts of macOS?

Post by frans_13 » Wed Sep 15, 2021 4:28 am

I have an office machine, a mixing machine and a few tracking computers in the studio as well.
They all have different OS and none of them is totally up to date, because i feel it doesn't offer much for what it takes away.
I only ever "upgrade" every ten years or so, when a big enough difference warrants all the sheenanigans of making it work reliable.
I test-drive a configuration of OS, DAW and some needed plugins for a few days and see what works and what doesn't. The working system is written down, mirrored to a spare drive and kept that way until the machine dies or gets an upgrade a few years later.

The funny thing i noticed is that identical machines (apart from serial#) with the same parameters, quality RAM, OS, etc.etc. will behave differently while under long tracking duty. I can't explain why but weeded them out. One of my tracking machines is more than 20 years old, runs 10.4 with MADI and is 100% solid on long sessions, still. It won't get an upgrade. There is no upgrade from working perfect.

I have the impression that in the "development"* of operating systems, not much happened the last 10 years with OSX that is worth the trouble, but you may come to different conclusions.

* it would be a development if there weren't a timetable for "innovations" that are dished out when marketing decides so, not when something clever comes along
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Snarl 12/8
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Re: Stripping away unnecessary parts of macOS?

Post by Snarl 12/8 » Thu Sep 16, 2021 3:08 pm

I've had to do this on every OS I've ever run. Even for non-musical uses. I still call it "pruning my extensions" even though I haven't been on MacOS for decades.
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