The Butt Ugly Weblog

A couple of OSX tips

I've recently been plagued with OSX performance issues - tasks using a lot of CPU, and inexplicable beach balls popping up, machine getting stuck and making life miserable in general. So here's what I have learned:

SystemUIServer eating all your CPU

TL;DR: Kill it, it's safe. Run "killall SystemUIServer" in your Terminal whenever that happens. It will restart itself.

Longer story: sometimes an application which is occupying your menu bar can get stuck doing network traffic, and this may appear as SystemUIServer getting stuck in a loop. You can either get rid of the offending menubar app, or just kill the SystemUIServer process, which will be respawned by OSX, but in an unstuck state this time. It will get stuck again sooner or later if you don't get rid of the app, but it doesn't happen that often. More information.

System slow, disk activity even if I have plenty of memory, apps show spinning beach balls often

TL;DR: Disable swap memory with

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

Longer story: As stated in this article OSX virtual memory handling, Spotlight and problems in HFS compound sometimes to the state that the system spends way too much time swapping perfectly good bits from disk to memory and vice versa. So, you can go ahead and kill the swap with the above command. This has made my Mac a lot faster, but the downside is of course that you need enough memory (8G or more) so that your system does not die suddenly. This isn't without its risks, but so far I'm very happy that I did this.