DaveNet: Thursday, July 10, 1997; by Dave Winer.
MacsBug and Caches
Talking with a reporter friend this morning who is a Mac user, I realized that many people who use Macs don't know about MacsBug; and don't know that, for many people, the larger your browser cache, the longer your machine takes to restart.MacsBug
When a Mac app crashes you often get a dialog with a cryptic message and one button that says Restart. No choice, you have to wait thru a restart.
But, if you have the MacsBug INIT installed, when the machine crashes, the screen goes blank and a command line pops up. Type ES and press the Return key. The app quits. Very often you can go on with your work. If you get the blank screen again, it's time to restart, type RS and press the Return key.
You can download MacsBug thru www.download.com. Ignore the warning on the download.com page, it's not just for programmers. MacsBug is pretty essential stuff. It's true that it's jarring and not pretty, but it saves so much time and often work.
One more thing, MacsBug has an awkward name. It's not MacBugs (which makes me thing of a bunny for some reason) or MacBug. The 's' is for system. It's the Mac system debugger. See how that works?
Faster restarts
Chuck Shotton, cshotton@biap.com, turned me on to this one.
When web browsers came onto the scene a few years ago they made a design choice that meant that booting Macs would become much slower.
When the system boots, it opens the resource fork of every file in the System Folder and all its sub-folders looking for INITs and CDEVs and other memory resident code. The more files you have in your System Folder, the longer it takes to boot.
Here's the problem. By default, your web browser stores hundreds of small files in the Preferences sub-folder of the System Folder. The more you cache, the longer it takes to boot your system.
If you use MSIE, check out:
System Folder:Preferences:Explorer:Explorer Cache:If you use Netscape:
System Folder:Preferences:Netscape f:Cache f:The solution is simple, store your cache files in a different folder, on a different disk, or in a RAM disk. After you do this, be sure to empty out the old Cache folder to get a faster restart the next time.
Dave Winer