Increase velocity of Mac drive by deleting Log files

Slowing down of Mac has became a common issue for Mac users. I remember those days when I bought a new Mac machine after getting inspired from its fast performance and efficiency but couldn't get the same results that I was expecting. I encounter that my Mac became sluggish just after few months of usage. Then I took my machine to my friend who is old to Mac (Mac geek) and he told me the cause of sluggish Mac. It was due to the presence of lots of log files that degraded my Mac performance. Log files degrade system performance by reducing free space. But, you can overcome this problem by finding and deleting log files from Mac.

Log Files :-

A log file is a type of file that contains a list of events. It consists of number of events that have been "logged" by a system. Today, as there are many software available in market and with this increase in the number of software, their installation in our system also get increased, which increases the size of log files in drive.

• Generation of Log files: Log files are automatically generated during software installations activities.

• Created by Web servers

Log files are also created by web servers and useful in many other purposes. One of the important use of log files is to track various parameters of website visitors. This includes information about visitor's IP address, time of visit, and pages visited.

During software installation various log files are generated which contains a list that will be added to the drive. This list of files include date and the time of files installation, and also their location in the directory. 

 

This allows users to see when and which files were installed on their machine by a specific program. And this is more useful when troubleshooting program crashes or during uninstalling an application.

Another important use of log files is to keep track of which resources were loaded on page during each visit, such as images, JavaScript, or CSS files etc. User can processed this information by statistics software, and it displays all the information in a user-friendly format like web analytics in google.

For example, a user can view a graph of monthly and daily visitors also by clicking on each day to view detailed information.

View log files on console: -

Log files may also be generated by operating systems, software utilities and FTP programs. For example, In Mac OS X, log of all programs and system crashes are saved on console so, it can be viewed using built-in Console application. Mostly log files have a ".log" file extension, but some have ".txt" extension.

Console is a great tool to view log files in Mac. It gives a nice feel while exploring the inner workings of your system through log files information. Mac has so much stuff running that is hidden or not visible to user. So, examining the constantly updated log files is a great way to tune your machine.

Examining log files in Mac:-

• Opening Console application found in OS X 10.5 and later. This can be found through Spotlight feature of Mac otherwise go to the Applications -> Utilities folder.
• You will found there about tens of hundreds of log files available.
• For example:system.log describes issues regarding whole system. DNS (Domain Name Server), networking. mail.log is occasionally useful when trying to get the Mail application straightened out.
  
  

It is quite clear that accumulation of Log files plays a big role in slowing down Mac performance. With the passage of time, number of log files increases resulting in less free space for other application or file and hence decreases performance of Mac. So, it is important to delete these files from Mac system using third party Mac cleaning application or optimization tool.