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cache

When you should use Safe Mode, and what it does

Claimed to block 3rd-party extensions and customisations from loading, check the startup disk, and to clear some system caches. When and why should you use it?

March 21, 2025 Macs, Technology

Take control of disks using APFS

Speed up your hard disk by partitioning it so that its innermost 20% remains unused. Reserve space for the SLC write cache on an SSD by limiting the size of volumes.

March 18, 2025 Macs, Technology

Why SSDs slow down, and how to avoid it

Covering thermal throttling, extended coverage of SLC write cache depletion and how long it takes to empty the cache, Trimming, and more.

March 17, 2025 Macs, Technology

The Finder doesn’t leak memory, but fills it with cached thumbnails

It turns out that the Finder is just retaining all those image thumbnails in its memory for 2-3 days after you last browsed them. Is this what we want?

December 20, 2023 Macs, Technology

Safe mode, caches and CacheDelete

What does Safe mode do to all those service caches managed by CacheDelete? Does it still check your boot disk too?

May 3, 2023 Macs, Technology

Ventura space management: what gets purged and how?

Performed by CacheDelete, it first looks at a wide range of macOS caches, and only at the end purges snapshots, to free up space when it runs short.

April 19, 2023 Macs, Technology

Caches, buffers and swap

They’re everywhere: whatever you do, something somewhere will cache it. Later that can cause puzzling problems, but makes our Macs faster as a result.

February 4, 2023 Macs, Technology

All you need to know about Safe mode

T T Read More

Invaluable tool for identifying and locating some problems, for troublesome updates, clearing caches and more.

December 19, 2022 Macs, Technology

Explainer: caching

They contain recently browsed web pages, ARM code translated from Intel executables, security data, font information, and much more. And they can cause problems.

October 9, 2021 Macs, Technology

Why doesn’t that document’s icon display properly? Beyond QuickLook

It has been one of the oldest problems on Macs, when a document shows with the wrong icon. Why, and how to fix it?

January 30, 2019 Macs, Technology

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