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What goes on when the installer says it's 'optimizing system performance'? thx

very good question. this takes a very long time on my new 10.1.1/G4. very long means over 5 minutes ! what happen there ? show log says scanning disk for the most of the time.

[ November 29, 2001: Message edited by: Marco ]</p>

i'm not sure, but my theory is:
update_prebinding
what i think that does is associate various system things so stuff like files will open in the right applications, but i really don't know.
and optimizing takes different amounts of times for different installs, too. system installs take forever, shtuff i get here doesn't normally take too long.

wow, i reinstalled with hfs+ instead of ufs and its a lot faster now! [img]images/icons/shocked.gif"%20border="0[/img]

i thought i had a unix system ..... i wonder why osx do so crappy with ufs?

I'm not sure what runs when one of the packages from this site is installed. Most packages from apple will have some interesting files in them;

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">code:</font><hr><pre>
package.pkg/Contents/Resources/preflight
</pre>[/quote]
This is a script which runs before the package is installed.

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">code:</font><hr><pre>
package.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight
</pre>[/quote]
This runs after the pax archive is installed.
You can check these out to see what apples packages are doing. There are usually some other scripts in this directory which determine the osx version you are running and lots of other things.

You can run any of Apples installers manually like this:
<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">code:</font><hr><pre>
su
(enter root password)
cd package.pkg/Contents/Resources
cp package*gz /
cp postflight /
cd /
gunzip package*gz
pax -r -f package*pax
chmod 755 postflight
./postflight
</pre>[/quote]

This will let you install updates even if you have a beta osx version, are downgrading, etc.

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: apex ]</p>

watching 'top' while the installer was optimizing. it sure was doing a lot of update_prebinding.

Originally posted by Dan:
What goes on when the installer says it's 'optimizing system performance'? thx

It is binding the application to the libraries that it uses. This decreases the launch time for the application, since it takes a lot less time to load the libraries that the application will be using.

thx all for replying [img]images/icons/smile.gif"%20border="0[/img]