Upgrading RAM Upgrading storage Installing faster processors Ensuring plenty of free space
Not all of these options are applicable to every Mac, but even if you cannot upgrade your Mac’s RAM, there are steps you can take to improve overall performance without having to spend money on updates. Of all the items listed above, the first thing you should do is ensure that you have an excess of free space on your Mac’s startup drive. If you can’t achieve a reasonable amount of free space by removing unneeded or unwanted apps, documents, and data, then you may want to consider moving your user folder to an external drive to free up space.
Terminal Tricks to Enhance Performance
One common way to improve performance is to reduce the amount of superficial eye candy included with macOS. One example is the use of animation to shrink an open window down to fit in the Dock. This type of animation doesn’t take a great deal of processing power when compared to, for example, applying a complex filter in Photoshop. But if your Mac is busy trying to render new images in your favorite image editing app while you’re working in your favorite database app, then adding the resources needed to animate a window could be enough to slow your Mac down to a crawl. While taken individually, these Terminal tricks may not show drastic improvement in speed and performance, but in combination they do a great deal. The end effect is that your Mac will be able to complete tasks faster, with less load on the processor cores. We’ll be using Terminal for all of these tricks, and while none of the commands on their own should cause any problems, it’s always wise to make sure you have a current backup before proceeding. If you’re ready, let’s get started.
Disable Window Animations
As mentioned, window animations require a certain amount of graphics and processing power, which delivers no real benefit other than a bit of eye candy. Here’s how to turn window opening animations off: Another window animation occurs when you resize a window and when you select to Open or Save a file within an app. Here’s how to disable them:
Dock Improvements
If you like to hide your Dock, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a delay between when you move your cursor to the Dock area and when the Dock appears. You can change that delay so that the Dock appears right away:
Time Machine
This tip is a one-time tweak to speed up the initial Time Machine backup. MacOS throttles Time Machine by assigning it a low CPU priority. This is actually pretty helpful since it prevents Time Machine from grabbing CPU resources and slowing down your Mac’s overall performance. There’s one exception, though. When you perform an initial Time Machine backup, the backup size can be so large that it will take a long time to complete, since its CPU priority is throttled.
