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Is Mac OS X Slow?
Junks Jerzey asks: "Every time there's a mention of Mac OS X on Slashdot, there's a flurry of responses about how unbearably slow Mac OS X is. To anyone who has done software development under both Mac OS X and Windows or Linux, is there any truth to this or is it simply a knee-jerk reaction from non-Mac users who see low numbers like 800MHz. I'm talking about average priced Macs here, like the LCD iMac line, not the dual 1.25GHz machines that sell for $4500+." Having the fortune of using a Titanium Powerbook for over a month, I don't find Mac OS X that slow at all, however, there are some things that do take a little longer than I am used to, but I think these things are application-specific. For those Mac OS X users out there, have you noticed operations that seemed slower using Mac OS X compared to similar operations on other operating systems?
"have you noticed operations that seemed slower using Mac OS X compared to similar operations on other operating systems?"
Simple answer, yes. Complex answer: Those systems aren't running Windows. Mac OS X is always RESPONSIVE. If a splash screen comes up, you can still pull another application in front of it. If an app is running a huge calculation, you can still web browse. iTunes doesn't skip. You can play DVD on your background (you have to set your background color to a specific value, start up the DVD, then hide the DVD player). You put a really pretty fish tank OpenGL screensaver as your background. Running many mpeg4s at the same time doesn't choke the system. It keeps going, in fact if you just add ram, like with any Unix system, you can throw any number of big jobs at it, and it will keep going.
That being said, you have to wait for the genie effect to take place. Because it's a friggen animation. Same with icon removals from the desktop. If you aren't running QE (which from what I know is most of the OS X installs today), you get a big CPU hit on moving windows, resizing, and putting in dock. But it still keeps going. I'm really quite amazed at how well it works, day in, day out.
Am I unpleased, no. Do I even consider other OS's. Not anymore. Can it be made faster, sure.
Burn Hollywood Burn
It still isn't as fast as Linux or XP (IMO), but has enough polish that I still prefer using it. There are some things that count more than speed. I think OSX does well on those.
I must ask though why these rather generic OSX discussions keep coming up on Slashdot. They seem more appropriate for some forum rather than "news for geeks." Don't get me wrong, I love OSX. I can't wait for 10.3 which will probably be the final reason to pick it over other OSes. But does it really justify all these topics?
Uh, what kinda vid card?
.. a problem that my win2K box encounters anyways.
My understanding is if your windows are being buffered in ram, its slow. If you have an open GL vid card and quartz starts using GL and vram to store the window buffers (its called quartz extreme, right?), much of the slowness disappears. At least until you have tons of windows open
Personally, if 3d/trans desktops are to be the norm in the future, every window will have to be buffered *anyway*, so I think Apple is just taking a performance hit to stay a little ahead of the elegance-curve.
Note to moderators: I might be talking shit, as I'm a former Mac head and now watch from the sidelines. Wait for confirmation from toher folks if you feel like modding my post.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Mozilla for OS X is the slowest OS X app I have. I still use it cause I'm totally addicted to tabbed browsing, but I sure wish it were faster.
(I know this is not an OS problem, it's a bloaty Mozilla problem)
Okay, I've got an indigo iBook (G3 366) running 10.2. I've run OS9 on it, as well as the public beta of X, 10 and 10.1. I've got a 900 MHz Athlon that has run 98, 2k and RedHat 7.3. So I've a bit of experience here with various systems at less than top-end speeds.
10 was unbearably slow. 10.1 was better. 10.2 is useable. I actually think for most native apps, it's faster than similar tasks in MacOS 9 were. It's certainly more versatile - I can get into SMB shares and the like. But that's not what the question was really asking.
So, how does it compare with the other OSes? Well, I certainly haven't done any real tests, but for just average use I find it pretty similar to my Athlon 900 except where things like MP3 player visualizations ore 3D performace go (and what can you expect when you're comparing a Rage 128 Mobile 8MB with a GeForce 3 TI 200?)
The big slowdown on MacOS X was always windowing, but this has been vastly improved with Quartz Extreme. I don't have enough graphics card to get the full benefits from it, but even on this old machine, resizing and moving have been much faster. In fact, it seems to perform better in that respect than XWindow on the Athlon, not that I find that terribly surprising.
I don't notice a big difference. In some cases, it seems a little faster. In some, a little slower.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
I think the question is really one of perceived speed. I noticed that on the AMD box, and Win2000, the common behaviour for screen draws is to wait until the operation is finished, then draw all-at-once. For example, IE, when loading a page, will remain exactly as it is (the current page you're on), until such time that it loads Slashdot, then draws it in one fast swoop.
Now, OS X does this as well, but it tends to give more feedback. The browser window will turn white, then the banner appears, then graphics and text. I've timed both boxes - they render within a half-second of each other (again, subjectively). The OS X box could easily give the impression of slowness. But it isn't really.
There are some things in OS X that need improvement - notably window-sizing - but then again, the Win2000 box still does outline-drawing for resizing so it's not fair.
In the end I think Quartz Extreme is Apple's answer to this. Quartz does a hell of a lot more work than the current Windows drawing scheme, and it looks a hell of a lot better. When OS X first appeared, many lamented the excessive eye-candy. Now we have a scheme where your normally-dormant hotshot GPU is helping out with drawing the OS. It makes a gigantic difference, and takes a major load off the CPU. But it is version 1. It will get better.
I expect Microsoft to go through similar growing pains when they go for the photorealistic desktop in Longhorn.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Doesn't Objective-C suffer from the same performance problem as Java in that there is no early-binding by a linker of the explicit functions/methods that will be called in an application?
Is late-binding the largest cause of poor performance in OS X? And, if so, does this mean that GNUStep is a bad idea?
I recently installed OSX on a really slow machine : an original bondi blue 233MHz iMac with ONLY 96MB ram. Theoretically not even sufficient to even run OSX. Previously, the machine ran yellowdoglinux and was not usable at all : launching Konqueror took forever. I never succeeded in getting openoffice fully launching the wordprocessor.
:-)
OSX On the other hand runs perfectly ! No hickups at all. Slow, admittely, but that's only due to insufficient ram. I auto-launch at startup :
- apache/mysql/php/openssl suite.
- Projecttimer
- DynDNS client
- Chimera
- process monitor
- terminal with at least 5 sessions
- fuzzyclock
- mail
booting the machine up to ready-to-use point takes nearly 10 minutes. A drag. But once it is there, I can use all these apps perfectly well. Switch times are well under 1 sec. Occasionaly I launch MS Office and keep it swapped away. When activating it, it's there in less than 10 secs. Considering it needs 100MB on its own, that's nearly a miracle !
Honestly : OSX is amazing in its speed. The gui is a tad slow sometimes with the fancyschmancy transparency in menus and all that (no QuartzEx here) but once you got you windows positioned and you're not dragging stuff around, it runs smototh enough for every average user.
My tiBook667 on the other hand screams like a scramjet. Beats every other OS in speed for me. I work twice as fast on it compared to the WinXP P4@2.7Ghz next to it with a GeF4ti4600.
In fact : I only use that PC for warcraft and DooM3 alpha
which brings us to the one thing that OSX sucks at : openGL drivers of the radeon series are poopy at least. Most PCs play games better than macs, but hey, you've gotta give'm something to do, right...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Since I was buying a cluster my criteria was not single processor speed but speed per dollar what i found was mildy surprising. For programs that could take advatage of the altivec chip inside the G4, the mac was about a factor of 2 cheaper per run time than the P4 and athalons. On the otherhand with the Altivec turned off the mac was about a factor of 2 more expensive per run time. I note that this was not done on code optimised for the altivec but was just generic fortran passed through an automatic vector pre-processor program for compile time optimization.
Of all the processors I tested, P3, p4, athalon, the P4 had the wildest variations in benchmarking. that is all the other proceesors seemed to have constant scaling factors in speed as the applications varied. but the p4 variev by over a factor of 3 from the others both faster and slower. I assume this has something to do with the very long pipeline, and the hyper threading, and the size of the caches. But even taking these into account I found it highly unpredictable which applications would run faster or slower (that is ones that might logically have more cache misses did not neccessary degrade)
. In the end I decided the P3 has the most bang for the buck , though falling cpu prices might shift that conclusion to the athalon. The problem I encountered with the athalon was a higher down time for the cluster units due to thermal faliure., so thats a hidden cost. The apples NEVER failed in any thermal tests so thats a hidden plus.
Now this analysis does not factor in other things like Graphics speed other factors more important to users than sceintific apps. However when I compare my molecular visualization grpahics before and after the release of 10.2 I have to say the mac is insanely fast for graphics now wheere before it was intolerably slow.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Granted it only has 512mb of ram,, but this thing (Running 10.2, G4 400, blah blah) is afflicted with the dreaded "Spinning Beach Ball of Death".
Lets check google..
Ahh, here is one:
Sour Apples
Everyone is talking about it. Check google groups for discussions among DV and print people.
I spend more time here at work waiting for typing to catch up to those words being rendered on my screen, patches of my web browser window being blank, only to show up again when my cursor goes over the area. When I right click a file to choose "open with" I wait a a good 15-25 seconds for the highlighted area to get past the "Open" dialogue. It just sticks there. If I try and do something smart like hit a key, I go into "Spinning Beach Ball" mode. Not a very fun place to be.
So all in all, while I like some aspects of OS X, I spend the day at work *craving* getting home to use my redhat machine.
I know I am gonna hear: get more ram. which is true, but still, 512mb is fine on all my intel/amd based machines. I know the Apple demographic is all white, rich and owns 2.5 SUV's (that match their two wonderful white children!!), but dog slow with 512mb is just simply insane.
Roughly zero. An Objective C message dispatch is around 3x slower than a straight C function call, which is not noticeable in the vast majority of code. And in the rare cases where it is, there are simple optimizations that can eliminate it (see methodForSelector and related methods of NSObject).
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I bought an iBook with 128MB of ram. Holy crap, it was the slowest machine I think I've ever use. OS X is a *huge* memory pig. It takes like 320MB of ram with Mail.app and Chimera open. So with 128, it's just swapping all the time. The drive runs constantly. I bought a stick of 512MB from crucial.com, and now it's actually decent. I wouldn't say it's blazingly fast, but it's very usable now. Seems faster than my old Sony PIII 550 laptop too.
I'm sure the G4's are much faster, but I didn't feel like dropping $2500 for a laptop at the time.
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There are many intangible factors that could contribute to this discussion. I use OSX everyday and I love it, of course, I'm not compressing video or playing Quake 3. If you want to discuss productivity as opposed to raw computing horsepower, OSX wins everytime. Here's why:
.mac, its possible to synchonize user preferences among any number of macs... this means that no matter where I go, or what mac I am on, my bookmarks stay the same, as do all my preferences for all my apps (did I mention it remembers all my passwords for all the sites I visit also). Its now possible to have a meteor (leonidas style) hit my HD and have an identical install in less than 1 hour (from cd), no fussing about with configuring everything again.
1) No viruses.
2) I can clone my entire HD with a freeware utility (in other words, backing up is easy as pie)
3) With
4) I can install or remove RAM in less than 5 seconds on any powermac.
5) OSX.2 boots very very quick on dual processor machines... its about 15-20 seconds.
6) Apple gives you, out of box, almost all the software you need to get productive, which in turn means very few installs from cd.
7) 802.11 networking is built into the OS and every new mac... no drivers necessary.
8) Almost every printer is supported in X.2, same with cd burners, again, no drivers or installs necessary.
9) Its cool watching my linux friends not use the GUI.
Sure I am biased, being a mac head, but what would compel me to use windows or linux... I hate installing stuff,I hate viruses, I hate it when my mom asks me why she can't open attachments (for fear of virus).
About the only thing wrong with macs right now is the mouse, which imho would benefit from a few more buttons and a scroll wheel.
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, there are rules." -Walter
Especially the newest release - they sped up a lot of the UI stuff. Nice and snappy.
Normal applications like e-mail, Word, that sort of thing, quick.
Hard to say on the Photoshop stuff, and plus I don't really care if something takes half a second or a full second to do if I'm waiting on some complex PS thing.
That said, I've only used the machines of friends and coworkers, I don't personally own a mac.
I do think they are really pretty.
But I do a lot of Java programming and the Mac is retarded slow with its Java compared to just about any other system out there. Even the newest one - the newest one seems to have even slower OpenGL somehow.
I also don't like that Mac has Java 1.3, and from what I can tell, you are fixed at that until they decided that they will upgrade it in their own release, regardless of the fact that there is 1.4x out for sometime now, which actually has a lot of things that some of us need and use.
All in all, I think the Mac is plenty fast, after all it is stupid to look at only the nominal speed of the processor. Look at Seti or Distributed net -there you can see that the G4 and G3 kick major ass, largely due to their much larger cache size.
And for everyday use, the Mac seems like it is just fine.
But when people say it is "better" I'm not sure I agree with them - I no longer think it sucks (OS X is pretty nice), but it isn't really of any use to me until either it becomes cheaper than a comparable PC system, or until it becomes faster than a comparable PC system.
but right now, for my personal use of it, it is only prettier, and I don't really care about that.
At least, I don't care enough to pay $2K more for a laptop that is snazzier looking than the one I sit here and type on, but slower and ill equipped for how I make my living.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I get tired of people stacking the deck against Macs by claiming Macs cost too much, then inventing some insane price out of thin air, like $4500. You'd have to build a pretty high end config, like a dualie 1.25Ghz with an Ultra160 RAID. Sure, you can build a wintel dualie hotbox and get up in the same price range. But I'm blazing along on a midrange dual 1Ghz machine, and oh man is it fast, and only $2500. So what is the point of attacking a Mac on price and claiming you can't get a machine except by paying $4500?!? Even an XServe doesn't cost that much.
Anyway, I've had amazingly good performance in MacOS X, but there were a few rough edges at first. Finder was kinda slow on my old G3/400 and G3/500 machines, like sorting by kind in list view. They're getting some of the metadata stuff sorted out, the new Jag finder is all fixed up and speedy. The only laggy app seems to be the Terminal, which could use a replacement. But the core Unix apps have excellent speed. I put my old G3 into use with Apache & Quicktime Streaming Server, I'm amazed at how well it performs.
Anyway, someone commented that MacOS X is hard on the apps but cushy on the user, or something like that. Right on. That was one of the Mac's big innovations, the GUI focused on the user. When I am running something like Final Cut Pro, I want every GUI screen gadget running full max. I want every single iota of computing power focused on ME and helping me get through the complex task. This is both the Mac's greatest feature and biggest CPU bottleneck. It's like the olden days of OS 9 before preemptive multitasking, when you held down the mouse, the whole CPU would hang until you let go of the menu. Whenever you were issuing commands, the CPU gave up control to the user. It was a CPU bottleneck, and we LIKED it, it gave the MacOS the immediacy of operation, a feeling of being in control that other OSes lacked. And I think they've translated that well into MacOS X. The system GUI still remains responsive, even when you're running CPU-intensive apps. Apps like Cleaner mpeg2 compression are as CPU-intense as it gets, it can compress 1 minute of DV video in 50 seconds on my midrange CPU. Cleaner is dual processor and Altivec aware, it maxes out both my CPUs, it's as hard a CPU workout as I have found. And it still leaves the system responsive, not locked up and CPU-bound.
I've noticed a general trend among people i'm acquainted with that their favorite OS feels fast to them, but any others are slow. For example, a Mac fan will think Mac OS is nice and speedy but will complain about Windows and Linux as being slow. Whereas a Linux user will complain about Mac and Windows being too slow.
I have two theories on what might cause this. The first is that different systems spend relatively different amounts of time on various tasks. And since they don't work exactly as what one is used to, and most people tend to notice flaws fairly readily, the slower areas are easily noticed and the system feels slow. My other theory is that people notice the user interface differences and since they aren't used to it they want to complain, but not having anything specific to complain about they claim it to be slow. I don't know the real reason. Any other ideas?
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
1. Get version 10.2.1 2. Get a RADEON or better 3. Get 512MB+ of RAM 4. Get rid of the Internet Explorer and Mozilla, which run at glacial speeds on Mac OS X, and use Chimera or Opera
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Good message. One point:
"They're just not. In fact, they tend to run (slightly) slower, clock for clock, in SPECmarks."
The fact that SPEC is optimized for x86 plays a role as well.
Those responsible for the previous corrections have been sacked. :)
Let us not forget that Cocoa can be used from C++ and Carbon from Obj-C - and that you can always just use plain C or C++ and Carbon if your application absolutely cannot waste time on dynamic type checking. I've gotten fond of Cocoa lately, but I'm working on an audio application that needs almost ridicuously low latency, so I have to have fairly fast callbacks - so I'm doing it in Carbon. The extra pain in the GUI is worth the performance for this case, altho it may not be so for all things.
The only problem I have with the operating system UI is the lack of window shading.
;)
You need.... WindowShade X
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/wsx/
That's right... now you can get WindowShade functionality in OSX... only better.
please note, I don't work for unsanity... I just like their stuff
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
The interface is slow... the kernal is slow... fine and dandy but how about some numbers. First the systems TiBook 800, iBook 500? (it is at work and I forget precisely), G4 tower 400, G3 Desktop 300, Apple 7300 (200 mhz). All system have maximum amount of memory accessible by the hardware/installable in given slots.
Now two observations 1 Darwin no longer runs on the 7300. I have used this box as a database server and had good results. Apple fix this. Second the G3 systems are noticably slower as far as windowing.
Now is MacOS X slow? Yes as far as accessing memory. No as far as crunching numbers. And Yes as far as the window server is concerned. Yes as far as running OS 9 native apps is concerned, and yes as far as running anything that is not built on the Objective C Cocoa API's.
Data
MySQL look ups take longer on the TiBook (fastest system) than my Athalon Ghz system running Linux (Red Hat 7), but just slightly as in the difference is less than my reaction time at a console window, note I realize this is not a valid test, and have watched processor time and observed the macintosh to take about 1.3 times the time of the pc to do the same query and exit as on the macintosh using a cloned database.
Crunching numbers using altivec accelerated code (simple data analysis on large amounts of data) the Mac wins the G4 400 is roughly equivalent to the Athalon and the Ti Book runs a process that takes 30 sec on the PC in about 23 seconds. Sorry I can't distribute code.
Is the window server really slow? I don't think slow comparing the TiBook to a coworker's Dell laptop (the tiBook has an impressively better screen) running XP. but I would like to see some method of comparison. Notably the G4 400 running 10.2 has issues, Quartz Extreme is not supported on this machine and thus this machine is noticably slower refreshing the screen and drawing windows. I believe 10.1.5 is actually faster on the four systems that run it. But can't prove it with numbers.
Those are the numbers. To summarize, use native applications Omniweb is a great browser, or write your own, Cocoa is much easier than programming for X. Provide your Mac with plenty of memory (but same goes for XP, Linux, and BeOS). And if you really want to play games buy a GameCube or Playstation. And write Apple and tell them to fix bugs, post more of the Operating System as Open Source, adding hardware support, to encourage Cocoa not Carbon (doesn't help that that Apple uses the "Carbon" code name for the API derived from Classic and for the General API for OS X including Cocoa") and not focus on adding features.
Oh and in case anyone had any doubts I have been a Macintosh user since my LC in 1989,and I happen to enjoy being a Macintosh Zealot.
Take IE, for example. It seems to wait to display the page until it has the whole thing ready to render. On a big slashdot story, that can take a while. Compare to, say, most browsers on Linux, which seem to display while the page is still downloading. Browsing seems way faster on my home system on a 144 Kbit/second connection with Linux than it does at work on OS X on a T3.
On the other hand, I do have evidence that the Mac is actually slow. E.g., when I start to load a slashdot page at work, I often give up, switch over to the XP machine on the KVM switch, and go load it there, and finish ahead of the Mac. The XP machine is an ancient P2 400 with 384 megs of RAM, the Mac is an ancient B&W G3 300 MHz with about 600 meg of RAM, so the machines are comparable (both pathetic by modern standards, but comparable). So, it actually appears that the Mac is slow at browsing, and IE works in such a way to emphasize that slowness, making it seem unbearably slow.
Also, a lot of apps, and Finder, aren't as threaded as they could be. While IE, for instance, is busy getting that big slashdot page ready to display, the dreaded spinning color-ball shows up, so you can't switch back and view the other pages you were reading.
Finally, much Apple software IS slow. There's a thread on comp.sys.mac.advocacy about this right now, where someone was saying that the new generation of iApps seem slower than the previous iApps, and pointing out an apparent correlation between those written in Carbon (fast) and Cocoa (slow). However, other people have pointed out examples of fast Cocoa apps, so that is not the problem. Most interesting was someone who wrote their own photo manager, and compared to iPhoto. For some things, his is 2 orders of magnitude faster than iPhoto. Evidently, Apple simply used crappy algorithms in iPhoto. Apple's mail program is similarly problematic when mailboxes get large. A lot of people on comp.sys.mac.advocacy have given up on it and switched to Eudora, and report their Macs are nice and fast at mail then.
IE 5.2, Mozilla 1.2, iTunes, iPhoto, Flash MX, Graphic Converter, Mail, Sherlock, OmniWeb, BBEdit, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Toast 5.2, Retrospect Express, Terminal (running top so I could spy on things), QuickTime player, MediaPlayer, RealOne, Address Book, Fetch, iCal, SlashDock, iChat, and ICQ
...all running at once! And proftpd and Tomcat running on top Apache mod_ssl (with my friends chatting on my BB i wrote with MySQL).
Ya know what? No pageouts. Still had ~100MB free RAM. Could still operate each program (yes, there was a split second delay sometimes when i clicked on something, but top showed 69 processes running!). Not one program crashed. NOT ONE! I have a screen cap to prove it (so yes, i had grab running too). It might just be me, but what more could someone ask for an OS? It's not perfect but it is very new (yes, i know, nextstep blah blah blah, it is still different enough in my eyes to be forgivable).
Sorry about the mini-rant, but if I can have 25+ (some very memory hogging.. echem Mozilla...) apps running at once (on 3+ year old hardware) and still get stuff done, it sure has my vote. Yes, I know you could do this in Linux if there were that many commercial apps to do the test. (not trying to start a flame war, it's the god aweful truth. don't mod me down, prove me wrong).
So to answer the posters question... it's speed may or not be award winning, but the amount of productivity you'll get out of it is immesurable (which in my mind is the key).
today is spelling optional day.
When will people learn here? :sigh:
It isn't old code.
Second the BSD kernel is in the same address space as Mach and is compiled into the same file.
xnu (the Darwin kernel) is a hybrid, it is NOT a true microkernel. Get that through your heads.
The only thing microkernelish about xnu is that the code is broken up in a microkernel manner for easy porting.
Further, what version of xnu you were you guys testing with? xnu has gone through a massive amount of development.
In other words, I will not believe any such bench mark until you tell me how it was done and with which kernels and their respective versions.
I will say it again, xnu is a hybrid kenrel that for all practical purposes is monolithic.
You're right. I was mistaken. The Mach version is 3.0. But I was right about the BSD. It's 4.4 BSD Lite2. IIRC, NeXT used 4.3 BSD. Either way, both are still old code. They don't have the benifet of the nearly one decade of advancements that have happened in kernel design since they were written. Take a look at the papers published by Sun and the Net/FreeBSD VM guys in the last few years. Modern free kernels have implemented these features, XNU hasn't. Is Darwin 6.x better than 4.4 BSD lite-2? Undoubtedly. But has Apple had the time or resources to make up for the long period of non-development? The benchmarks would indicate that they have not.
I don't follow the Darwin mailing lists, so would you care to sum up the improvements that make 10.2 twice as fast as 10.1.5 in lmbench? Cuz that's what it's losing by to Linux and the BSDs. I don't see much in the ChangeLog that'd do that.
I never said that moving the BSD part of the kernel into the same address space doesn't increase performance. I said it's not as fast as a normal monolithic kernel that doesn't have the additional layering. In OS X, low level work is abstracted by Mach for the BSD layer to use. This was probably the time-effective solution, to keep the general structure of NeXT in place, but the additional layer of abstraction does incur a performance hit.
That said, I'm not a Darwin kernel developer. Someone asked why Darwin was slower in lmbench and this is my explanation. If you have some actual evidence to contradict me (instead of apparently just misreading the statements I made) or can point me to the relevent code that contridicts anything I've said, feel free to do so.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I use an iMac to do some video editing and rendering to VCD, and I've noticed that if I switch from iMove to, say Finder, then the CPU usage of the iMovie render drops dramatically, and the estimated render time shoots up.
It looks like resources are being allocated for the foregorund application - even if it doesn't need them - presumably to improve the user's perception of performance.
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
Of course I'm using 10.1 - I've heard but I would like to see substantiated independently that 10.2 is a lot snappier. I am still mulling if I should acceed to the daylight robbery price Apple is charging to upgrade.
And hopefully mine won't get totally lost in the shuffle.
;), etc. ... all are MUCH faster on my old ass frankenstein G3 than on his brand spanking new Gateway. My Gateway owning roomie will even attest to this, and now he's kicking himself for not getting a Mac (partially due to Sherlock, actually).
;)
... it is custom made to organize data on Mac OS X drives in a way that speeds up the operations of the OS by orders of magnitude. Just did it last night and it cut my app launch time in HALF - and this is in contrast to doing regular Speed Disk optimizations and only seeing a hair of difference. So see if you can find it on LimeWire, its AMAZING, really makes OS X fly, especially on older hardware like I have.
Just from an average user's perspective (which I am not, but my roomates are), Mac OS X shreds the living daylights out of WinXP.
Case in point - my roomates new Gateway 2.4 GHz machine w/ WinXP Home is SLOW as all getout opening apps, drawing windows, traversing directories w/ lots of files in them, etc.
By contrast, the G3 I built from parts (420 MHz G3, 768 MB RAM, 2 7200 HDs on a 66 MHz bus) is faster in day to day activities like web browsing, using Office, using Sherlock (oh wait, only Mac users get Sherlock
So, is OS X slow? Answer: an unequivacable NO. Is it instantaneous? well, NO. But we're getting there
BTW - and this will be of interest to fellow Mac users - there is a Norton Speed Disk profile for OS X floating around the web
You wrote:
Um the BSD part being old is wrong. Apple borrowed some stuff from FreeBSD. xnu uses an older version of the FreeBSD kernel for the BSD part of the kernel. Further there is no such thing as "4.4 BSD-lites-2". There is the last version that came out of Barlely known as 4.4 BSD-lite but, I have no idea where you get the 2 in that.
Did I say it would be twice as fast as it is now? Get a clue. Don't put words in my mouth. I simply said that there were a number of changes and that it was faster. By your reasoning, everything must be a crtain way to your expectations or there is something wrong with it.
What you don't seem to understand is that Apple (and NeXT) used Mach for porting reasons. Think about it. What happens when Apple switches processor families again, if the code isn't as portable as it could be. To be blunt, the Linux kernel is not that portable and it take a lot of work to do it (PPC users of Linux would understand).
You also wrote:
That isn't very nice. I quoted exactly what you said. If you didn't mean what you said then you should have written it differently.
Tell me something, just what background do you have? My impression from reading your posts, is someone who thinks they know everything because they ran a test on the kernels (you did make a lot of factual errors).
I'm not going to comment further as I'm getting tired of trying to correct someone who thinks they know everything.
FYI, I'm not a kernel developer (and neither are you) but, I get my info from the developers themselves which, you didn't
I've only used 10.1, not 10.2. I used it on a g4 450mhz with 384mb of ram, and virtual memory turned off, over the period of a few months while dual-booting with OS9.
I found it to be annoyingly slow. Even after a clean install on a blank partition, I'd click on files and have to wait half a second for the computer to acknowledge it. I kept OS9 because Pro Tools hasn't migrated yet. They still don't have an OSX version, and I stopped using OSX 10.1. It was too sluggish.
I figured I'd just get the 10.2 update and use it when they made it faster. Then I found out there is no update. They want me to pay $120 for something I might not want to use, after I've already spent $120 on something I definitely won't use. I'm still using OS9 because I don't consider myself a rube. The next time I buy an operating system will be when I buy a new Mac and I get it included for free. No sooner.
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