My Powerbook G4 has been running way slow lately, and I finally have a little breathing room to address the problem. My impression is that a) my disk is really full, b) my disk is really fragmented, and c) this especially impacts virtual memory.

So my solution is:

1. Confirm that my latest daily Retrospect backup worked.
2. Delete old & large files; DiskInventoryX helps a lot to identify them.
3. Quick Defragment in iDefrag (oops, superfluous given later steps). Holy crap, it crashed in the middle of defragmenting! How nervewracking is that!? OK, no more iDefrag. Sheesh.
4. Optimize/repair in Disk Utility
5. Carbon Copy Cloner the disk to an image on another drive (using Target Disk Mode so the drive is not the boot disk)
6. Repartition to make a 2Gb Swap partition at the beginning of the disk (Maybe I could have done this without the cloning step using iPartition, but that’s expensive).
7. Carbon Copy Cloner from the image back to the (now slightly smaller) main partition. This should automatically defrag everything too.
8. Actually move the swap files to that partition using Xupport
9. Quit Mail.app, Delete ~/Mail/Envelope Index, start it up again and rebuild
10. Full Spotlight reindex of the disk (automatic, since CCC deletes the index)
11. Disable unneeded services… e.g., I had MySQL running but I don’t really use it
12. Mail.app prefs: delete messages immediately; etc.