Will quitting Finder in OSX still give a performance boost when playing videogames?

May 18, 2004 1:31 PM

On Mac OS9 I could quit the Finder to get an extra little performance boost when I played games (first person shooters mostly). Will this trick still work for OSX, or has all the new fangled technology made it obsolete?
posted by ssmith to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Obsolete. If you want to get an idea of how much CPU capacity and memory your various apps are consuming, run Activity Monitor (or break into the Terminal and type "top"). On my machine right now, the Finder is using 0.5% of CPU.
posted by adamrice at 1:35 PM on May 18, 2004

Actually, you still can add the menu item if you want to.
posted by milovoo at 2:03 PM on May 18, 2004

You can still quit the Finder if you want to. A program like Cocktail will let you turn the "Quit" menu option back on, then the Finder can be Quit like any other app. Adamrice is correct that it is of less use in OS X than it was in OS 9, though.
posted by bcwinters at 2:04 PM on May 18, 2004

Yeah, far better to renice the application you want to run fastest to a priority of -20.

First you find the process ID (it's the first number on the line you get from the following command):

ps | grep app_name

Then you renice it:

sudo renice -20 process_id

You can also do it using a GUI application. Utilities exist to automatically renice whatever is in front when you switch programs.
posted by kindall at 2:52 PM on May 18, 2004

Response by poster: Cool! Thanks for the tip kindall. Hopefully, this will help.
posted by ssmith at 3:16 PM on May 18, 2004