On Jan 31, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Bill Brown wrote: > Greetings Group. > > Have a question or two for you gurus: > > Basics: > iMac 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM. > > Question: > I read somewhere on one of these groups that the Macs perform some type > of automatic system routine early in the morning, like around 3 AM. Can > someone > enlighten me as to where I can find info regarding these late-nite routines? > I usually shut down my computers at bed time, and would like to know if > I'm harming or preventing the routines from running. Anyone know of this? > > Also, which Macs do this? I have the above iMac, a Mac Mini, and a Blueberry > 350 MHz iMac.
You're thinking of the nightly, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts, which do things like rotate logs, clear some caches, etc. Missing these scripts could eventually (over a very long time, years in some cases) cause slowdowns or even in extreme cases crashes (by running out of disk space, never a good thing for a unix system) because the system logs (in particular THE syslog) could become very large and unwieldy..I once saw a syslog that was 2.4 gigs in size. (a combination of something writing a ton of errors to the log, and the system being shut down every night, all for a couple months before someone asked me about this system that was mysteriously sluggish and unresponsive.) Here an old explanation of these scripts: <http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html> Since the advent of OS X using launchd instead of xinetd in 10.4, however, the scripts will run the next time the system is turned on if you miss 'em. So 10.2 or 10.3 systems will benefit from using Onyx or Cocktail on a regular basis, 10.4 and later don't need these utilities. Onyx offers a bunch of other useful utility functions so it's a good thing to have around. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com To leave this group, send email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist
