Keeping my Intel Mac Pure

Posted by Scott Hughes Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:08:00 GMT

It’s usually pretty tough living on the bleeding edge, but Apple has made things a lot easier with their switch to Intel. Thanks to Rosetta, you can still run just about all of your PowerPC applications under emulation. Since the emulation is obviously going to be slower, I’m trying to stay clear of any PowerPC apps if I can, especially if they are meant to run all the time (daemons). Apple created a handy logo to identify apps which are Universal (containing binary code for both Intel and PowerPC architectures), but I’ve found that there are some apps that still aren’t using logo. This means I typically have to visit the changelog of my favorite apps and search for the keyword “universal”. Optionally, you can download the app, select it in the finder, and hit Command-I to get its information screen. From there, you can see if it’s a PowerPC app under the “Kind” heading. It’ll read either “Kind: Application (Universal)” or “Kind: Application (PowerPC)”. If I find that it’s a PowerPC app, the url for it gets dragged into my “Waiting For Universal” folder in my Bookmarks Bar.

I did get bit by an app recently and I didn’t see it coming. I noticed a frustrating amount of slowdown on my MacBook Pro, especially when switching tasks. I searched for a long time to figure out which app I had loaded that was slowing me down by so much. My memory usage was extremely low, so disk swapping wasn’t the problem. CPU usage was next to nothing, so I was stumped as to what it could be. I had a 5-10 second delay when switching apps or when bringing up the dashboard, so something was definitely misbehaving. I checked my Console (Applications/Utiilities/Console.App) and I found that I had several plugins for Quicksilver and Mail.app which were throwing linker errors. The errors came from the fact that they are PowerPC plugins that got moved over via the Migration assistant. Even after removing those, I still had the noticable slowdown.

Finally I tried the Activity Monitor (Applications/Utiilities/ActivityMonitor.App). If you right-click on the column headers, you’ll see a drop-down to select which fields are available. Select the “Kind” field. Now sort on that field and you’ll see all of the PowerPC applications (those running under Rosetta) on your machine. These are the most likely to be causing slowdown, especially the daemon apps who are constantly performing work in the background. I found my culprit easily: The Delicious Library Dashboard Widget. Delicious Library was a Universal app, so I wouldn’t have suspected it. But the handy widget included with it has a separate binary component and that’s built as a PowerPC application (either that or the installer for the latest version failed to overwrite my old widget). After removing it from the Dashboard, I was again cruising at full speed. I sent Delicious Monster some feedback about the widget; seems to be an easy enough fix that I’ll bet it’s corrected before my RSS feed is updated.

If your MacBook Pro (or other Intel Mac) is experiencing slowdown (so early in its life!), I’d suggest you perform the same investigation. As an aside, here are some of the apps in my current waiting list now:

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