I have a problem — my computer can’t concentrate.

I’ve found a lot of ways over time to make my Mac work better for me. I run a bunch of little utilities and menu bar widgets and such that give me the information I want when I want it and make it very easy for me to do frequent actions, such as control my music, without having to waste time switching between programs. This goes along with my very strong belief that your computer is not working for you unless you have customized it to work the way you want to. In my ideal future, no one would ever ask to use anyone else’s computer because it would be completely incomprehensible, it would be so adapted to its owner.

Anyway, on Friday I wiped and completely reloaded my computer, hoping that it would solve the strange instability issues I’ve been having. Now I’m keeping even more track than I was before of resource usage, trying to arrive at the ideal combination of the utilities I want and the stability I require, along with keeping my memory and processor usage low. It isn’t an easy thing to achieve.

As you can see from the above, I don’t actually have very many apps running at the moment (the list was truncated to remove some small programs required by the operating system). While Safari, which has several open browser windows, may be justified in taking up 178MB of RAM, Quicksilver, my launcher, which isn’t even being used at the moment, takes up a whopping 109MB! iTunes seems a bit high at 65MB, and Adium, my IM client, seems high as well at 43MB, but 38MB for Synergy? Synergy is a simple app that lets me control my music with key combinations. It should be a small, simple add-on to iTunes, not a 38MB behemoth. Same with Growl, at 33MB, which shows notifications when events happen (like new mail arriving, or new songs coming on). And finally, look at QuietMBP! This is a tiny utility that does one thing — keeps my processor usage at a certain level — to deal with a terrible Apple design flaw that causes the MacBook Pro to emit an ear-splitting whine whenever it goes into processor power save mode. 15MB for the privilege of not having headaches may be a small price to pay, but it is still too high. In contrast, we have the Activity Monitor, from whence that screenshot came, which shows me all sorts of useful process information and graphs, all wile taking up only 10.5MB of RAM. I have to assume some of the other examples are simply sloppy programming if a mature app like Activity Monitor can keep its footprint so low.

Keep in mind that I usually have a lot more things running — four or five more utilities, my Mail program, etc. But even with this very minimal set of utilities, you can see why a Mac runs slowly with less than 1GB of RAM. The one good thing I can say about my current situation is that nothing I’m running right now seems to be the cause of the instability. I’ll keep adding back items, one at a time, so that I can isolate what was causing all the grief.