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Seriously Speed Up Leopard

AmazingHenry

AmazingHenry

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jul 6, 2015
1,285
534
Central Michigan
After looking around for some tips on speeding up Leopard (I just installed it on a 700MHz Mac), I found this really interesting article. With 2 Terminal commands, you can really speed up Leopard. Do this in addition to the other optimizations and you have a really speedy computer. I'm sure there's many members here who know about this already, but I thought I'd share it for the members who don't know. I hope this helps! My iMac is now really fast and I think I could easily use it as my daily driver (seriously!).

Here are the commands:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -dict deferredUpdates 0
disables BeamSync. Don't do this one if you are using a CRT (eMac, for example).

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver QuartzGLEnabled -boolean YES
Turns on QuartzGL.

See the website for more information on what these do and the possible problems you could run into (there aren't many, nothing serious. Read the webpage).
 
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You didn't give the commands! ;)

Seriously, maxing out the RAM is the easiest way hardware-wise to speed everything up. My core i5 mini will be getting 16 GB of RAM. From there it's a matter of disabling Virtual Memory for the last speedup.
 
MysticCow said:
You didn't give the commands! ;)

Seriously, maxing out the RAM is the easiest way hardware-wise to speed everything up. My core i5 mini will be getting 16 GB of RAM. From there it's a matter of disabling Virtual Memory for the last speedup.
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The commands are on the webpage I linked to. I'll update the post with them, though! Yeah, I should upgrade my RAM (only at 512MB now), but I don't see the point. I'm happy now and I don't need to use this computer for anything serious anyway.
 
Can you quantify the speed increase? I've previously tried those tweaks and couldn't benchmark any improvement.

I've found the window zooming and animations tweaks in Onyx to be the best for giving a snappier GUI, along with Shadowkiller.
 
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Dronecatcher said:
Can you quantify the speed increase? I've previously tried those tweaks and couldn't benchmark any improvement.

I've found the window zooming and animations tweaks in Onyx to be the best for giving a snappier GUI, along with Shadowkiller.
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I haven't done any benchmarks, but it feels a lot faster. Especially for videos and GUI animations.
 
HFTaylor12 said:
What came first: this post or the webpage I shared?
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The webpage you linked to. Sometime in 2013 it was posted according to my math.

The thread I link to was started in 2014.

That said, my intent was not to discredit anything that you've posted. It was to give you further information. There''s other stuff in that thread I linked to that help speed up Leopard.
 
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eyoungren said:
The webpage you linked to. Sometime in 2013 it was posted according to my math.

The thread I link to was started in 2014.

That said, my intent was not to discredit anything that you've posted. It was to give you further information. There''s other stuff in that thread I linked to that help speed up Leopard.
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OK, thanks! I thought I was being accused of stealing from @Altemose for some reason. :confused: I see your intent now, sorry!
 
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HFTaylor12 said:
OK, thanks! I thought I was being accused of stealing from @Altemose for some reason. :confused: I see your intent now, sorry!
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No worries.

No one really 'owns' this information. Except maybe Apple - if there really is an owner. So accusing you of stealing anything would be baseless since no one owns any of this.

Moving along…as with TenFourFox though, I put a lot of effort into tweaking Leopard. It's the main OS I use (you may know my reasons for not liking Tiger by now) and anything I can find that improves it's performance for me and others I like to share. Hence my link.

Carry on…

:D
 
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Everyone knows all intellectual thievery reaches out from Central Michigan ;) Joshin' aside, have you ever run geekbench on your imac? I wonder what it would score at. I'm working on speeding up Leopard too, so this is a handy conglomerate of how-to info. Great stuff :)
 
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RhianB said:
Everyone knows all the intellectual thievery reaches out from Central Michigan ;) Joshin' aside, have you ever run geekbench on your imac? I wonder what it would score at. I'm working on speeding up Leopard too, so this is a handy conglomerate of how-to info. Great stuff :)
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I'll try Geekbench out. I've never used it before, tbh. I just use the Mac and decide is it's fast or slow.
 
HFTaylor12 said:
I'll try Geekbench out. I've never used it before, tbh. I just use the Mac and decide is it's fast or slow.
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I just used it for the first time yesterday, so I'm new to it as well. From what I understand, with each version of GB, the bench mark is the "fastest" model of that generation ie: GB2 is based off a 03 "entry-level" powermac G5 scoring 1000, so when using GB2, my powermac G4 scored lower in the 843. So, yeah with each successive version, I assume the bench mark changes makig scores across versions inaccurate for comparing. Anyhow, since you're using Leopard, GB2.2.0 will work on your machine.

https://geekbench.en.uptodown.com/mac/download/20649
 
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RhianB said:
I just used it for the first time yesterday, so I'm new to it as well. From what I understand, with each version of GB, the bench mark is the "fastest" model of that generation ie: GB2 is based off a 03 "entry-level" powermac G5 scoring 1000, so when using GB2, my powermac G4 scored lower in the 843. So, yeah with each successive version, I assume the bench mark changes makig scores across versions inaccurate for comparing. Anyhow, since you're using Leopard, GB2.2.0 will work on your machine.

https://geekbench.en.uptodown.com/mac/download/20649
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Thanks! I'll download this on my iMac and try it out. I have done many optimizations and disabled many features, so it shouldn't do too bad. Keep in mind I only have 512MB of RAM, though.
[doublepost=1479669922][/doublepost]My iMac scored 339 on Geekbench 2.2. 700MHz G4, 10.5.8 Leopard, 512MB of RAM. I thought it would score higher, to be honest.
 
I don't think there is a direct way to convert them since generally newer means newer instruction sets. But if you want to try in GB4 my hackintosh scores 8032 multi and 4314 single in GB3 it's 3910 single and 8258 multi.

Then there is the issue with OS's I posted this in the MP section long ago but my Z800 with a pair of 5675 running Linux scored 18,xxx in OSX it scored 27,576.

I'm just not sure how much useful info you're going to gain by comparing cross platform, architecture, and OS
 
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