Anyone tried this?

[bookem]

I did, and it did seem to improve speed with 10 or more finder windows open. Seems to interfere with Classic, and some Cocoa apps, in particular OmniWeb & Office. Here goes:

The window server has a cool feature in OS X 10.1 that isn't enabled by default (though it will be in an upcoming update, as I understand it): window buffer compression.A little background. Under OS X, the contents of each window are saved in a buffer, so that they can be updated instantly, and also so that the cool transparency effects in Aqua are possible. This is a good thing, to have a fully buffered window manager -- however, it uses a lot of memory.In 32 bit mode ("Millions" in System Preferences), a window that is 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high uses up 1.9mb of RAM. When you consider that there are usually over 100 windows open when you're using OS X (not all windows are visible), you start to realize that this can start to add up in terms of RAM usage.The more windows you open, the more RAM they use up, the more that virtual memory will have to page in and out while you use your applications to do work. This can cause slow-downs as the disk grinds to do the virtual memory paging.So what Apple did was they implemented a compression mechanism into the window server. When a window's contents haven't changed for a given period of time, the window server compresses them, so they take up less memory. Since it uses a compression method that doesn't require the buffer to be fully decompressed to do compositing (dragging a window around, updating the screen, etc.), you won't notice a slowdown with this compression turned on.In fact, because less memory is being used up by the window buffers, more RAM will be available for your applications, with will mean less virtual memory paging, and may in fact result in speeding up your machine. Additionally, since less data needs to be read (it is compressed, after all!), things like updating windows may be faster as well.If you are a power user who has lots of windows open, you might consider giving this hack a shot. I'm using it, and getting compression ratios of about 8.5:1 (in other words, my window buffers are using 8x less RAM than they normally would).Now then, onto the hack! First, open up the Terminal application (found in /Applications/Utilities/) and type:sudo pico /library/preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist(you'll need to enter your admin password in order to proceed)Move the cursor down below the first <dict> tag, and paste the following text in:<key>BackingCompression</key><dict><key>compressionScanTime</key><real>5.000000000000000e+00</real><key>minCompressableSize</key><integer>8193</integer><key>minCompressionRatio</key><real>1.100000023841858e+00</real></dict>Then hit Control-X to exit pico (hitting the Y key to save the changes before exiting when it asks you), then log out and back in again, and ta da! Compressed window buffers. Enjoy...

[SCrossman]

This will be included in the next OS X 10.1.2 and for those with sufficient RAM like myself, I have not seen any subjective increase in speed.