The supply of minerals, ores and aggregates are crucial for the continuous development of today's society. With a rising world population, growing urbanization, and increasing standards of living, the performance and efficiency of existing crushers must be improved in order to meet the escalating demand on these products. The current paper thus presents a comparative study between existing cone crushers and theoretically optimal crushing sequences. Full scale experiments are conducted in order to examine the effects of Closed Side Setting (CSS), stroke, and eccentric speed on crusher output. The performance of the examined cone crusher is then compared against what is considered as theoretically optimal. The subsequent analysis shows that significant gains can be made in terms of both product yield and overall capacity by adjusting crusher operation depending on the conditions at hand, e.g. increasing the CSS while maintaining the same stroke or decreasing the eccentric speed. It is also shown that a mixture of breakages modes is more optimal than the sole application of one optimized breakage mode. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.