Common cause of slowdown?

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Your Mac's Specs
PowerBook G4, 1ghz, 40gb HD, 768mb mem, Tiger
Running G4 at 533mhz, 768mb memory.

The machine has had an uptime of several weeks (without restart) and is becomming less responsive.

I've been use to this type of thing on Windows platform. I thought OS/X would be better.

It seems the machine is busy doing it's own thing and careless of what I want it to do. Why should it take 10 seconds of hard drive crunching just to open another tab in Opera or Firefox? In fact the hard drive crunching is almost a 24/7 thing on idle. What the heck is going on?

Any ideas why this ill-responsiveness happens/never ending hard drive crunching and is there a solution other than restarting the machine?

This sort of thing makes me think less of OS/X resource management design. I've never had problem like this running OS/2, even on a three month up-time. OS/2 runs just as efficent on a fresh start as it does with several months uptime.
 
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Could be due to memory leakage ie programs that do not release all the memory that it uses properly. Also, it can also lead to memory fragmentation, the longer the computer is up, the fewer large areas of contiguous memory there is available.

Unless, you reboot or shutdown every program, tool and service, there is no way to get the memory back properly. Updates and bug fixes fix some of them but eventually its best to restart it.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
Have you ever run any maintenance tasks like MainMenu.

Also it might not necessarily be OS X that is the culprit, but applications, whose memory and caches might be bloating.

I myself always shut down the Mac when not in use, no harm in an occasional shutdown
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook
Running G4 at 533mhz, 768mb memory.
...I've been use to this type of thing on Windows platform. I thought OS/X would be better.
Well, you don't mention what version or build of OS X you're using, but imagine this:

Try running Windows XP Pro on a 700 Mhz Pentium III with only 256MB RAM.
Chances are, it's not going to run as smooth, fast or as well as you might think.
That is exactly the same situation that you are creating with the G4 you have.

Yes, there are maintenance scripts that can be run and a good cache clean won't hurt.

Point is, the OS will run... but you are running a newer OS on a much older machine. Sure, it technically meets the requirements for the OS, but don't expect a speed demon out of it. There will be times when the machine just seems to take its time and do whatever it wants to.


his sort of thing makes me think less of OS/X resource management design. I've never had problem like this running OS/2, even on a three month up-time. OS/2 runs just as efficent on a fresh start as it does with several months uptime.
OS/2 is also a fairy stripped-down and simplified OS when compared to OS X or even Windows. It doesn't have anywhere near the bloat of those two.
 

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