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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?
but this damn thing is to slowwwwwwww
but that's because most of the apps I support are only supported in Mac OS 9, so I have to wait for the OS 9 emulation window to open up, slow, slow, slow.
A good test would be with native OS X applications, compiled for OS X and not just emulating OS 9, but that's going to take a while.
A. Rightmann
You should see it on my Powerbook. I have the base requirements, and it runs like Windows XP on a Pentium Pro 180.
I recently installed OSX on my wife's iBook (366Mhz, 160MB RAM)...it previously had OS9.x on it, and it crawled. Neither of us would even want to use it, it was so bad.
After installing OSX, it's runs amazingly well, and not just for the eyecandy, etc. Compared to other OS's, I would say it's right about on target...sure, it's a little sluggish opening Photoshop or having multiple browser windows open, but most 366Mhz machines are.
I'm kind of surprised to see this question at all...OSX has struck me as very fast, all things considered.
-Gabe
I went to the mall and brought up IE on an 800 MHz mac faster than it comes up on my 2GHz Windows box or Mozilla on my 2GHz Linux box. Perhaps that's all cruft from having a system that's heavily used, but it certainly seemed well tuned to me.
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?
No matter if they have, no true Mac user would ever say so, and you know it.
I used to have time to take a shower while waiting for 10.1 to boot in the mornings. 10.2 has it down to a few sips of coffee. Maybe it was that goddamn Happy Mac hogging memory all those years. Who'dve thought?
Is MacOSX slow?
or
Are Macs slow?
For people who want to bash and criticise OS X, then of course it's TOO SLOW.
For people who enjoy and love OS X, then it's not all that slow.
There is definitely a class of people who need or want speed but don't have it, and they think OS X is slow. The hard part is figuring out whether their views and circumstances resemble yours so that you know whether to accept or discard their perception.
My view: OS X on a 400MHz G4 is fine. Applications my have a performance constraint due to slow CPU speed, but actual navigation of the OS is not a problem.
I also run OS X on a 933MHz G4. With a GeForce2, 768MB ram. Runs fine.
Slow always depends on how you define fast. Web browsing rendering is a tad slower and less optimized than under Windows, but on the flip side the HTML engine isn't integrated into the OS either.
And you really can't trust Microsoft to create a better browsing experience under OS X than under Windows XP, can you?
I use Mozilla just fine, though.
GPL Deconstructed
Is MAC OS X slow as a server as well?
I was thinking of getting one in at work to test it out as a web server, but I will not bother if it is slower than Linux.
I use both os x and linux pretty extensively. I've used linux on macs as well (yellowdog and linuxppc). Linux *is* faster, from a user experience point of view and from a systems standpoint - However, this is on older (400mhz) G4's. The new iMacs (and by extension the new PowerMacs) are *much* snappier, but they would be in linux too. Harkening back to a post from a few days earlier, os x has about 85-90% the raw speed of linux on identical hardware. Considering the UI and application base, that's good enough for me. Besides, if you wanted straight-up hardcore power, you wouldn't be using a ppc. You'd be using a .357.
Your sentence.
"but this damn thing is to slowwwwwwww"
suggested grammar and spelling.
"but this damn thing is too slow"
GRAMMAR AND SPELLING CHECK COMPLETE: 15 minutes 23 seconds 67 ms
If you have a G3 (as I do) there is no question Mac OSX is slower than OS9. Now Jaguar is faster than 10.1 but not fast enough to overtake OS9 on G3 hardware. Most of this seems to have to do with the GUI. One good example is to try resizing any window. Due to the live resizing the window stalls, stutters and gasps to catch up to the cursor. Why they didn't give up on live resizing and use an outline is beyond me. Another example is scrolling. Open up a really long text document and scroll. For me, in OS9 it moves much faster.
... how fast would OSX be without all the "Aqua" GUI eye candy? If they had toned down the NEED for graphics accelleration how cool would it be? My only answer is it's all a plot to get us to by the latest and greatest Apple hardware. If OSX ran great on a G3 there'd be less reason to upgrade.
In general everything seems to be a few split seconds behind. Now I know I don't have the latest "G4" hardware or Quartz Extreme, but I ask the question
I asked my mac to get me a beer from the fridge, and I am still waiting.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
I use alot of machines from both sides of the war (Win/Mac) at school, but I've never really seen any two systems that are worthy of comparing. Obviously my desktop with an XP2100 starts/runs Photoshop much faster than my friend's TiBook (we both have 1gb ram) But then again, the new imac is shockingly snappy out of the box for what it costs and those two machines combined are easier to carry around than something housed in a full-sized Antec. Speed can be achieved by anything as long as you have the cash for it, and alot of the bottlenecks that show up in the sort of applications that I run on a daily basis are more dependent on the video card than the OS.
I run Windows XP w/ themeing disabled, and Windows GDI is amazingly fast. I also think MacOS9 is fast (until a process hangs...).
I've tried OS 9 and OS X running on the same lamp-y LCD iMacs. OSX is SLOW. Sure it may look cool, but just think of all the processing power required to render all that shiat!
I went to open a csh Terminal, and I seriously had to wait about 30 secs till I received the % prompt. Ridiculous. Plus the font smoothing is overkill. The video seems to choppy as well, probably due to all that complex rendering. Yuck. OS X, you can keep it, thank you. Mac OS X is what made the Mac as popular as it is. Unlike WinXP, however, you can't disable the new overkill GUI and revert to a "Classic" style.
There are still some functions that OSX does not seem to handle as well as its Classic predecessor. OpenGL performance is at the top of that list. I have many games that run significantly faster in OS9 than in X, some even in Classic.
I'm not sure what exactly is the problem, but it does appear to be gradually improving. For example, upgrading from 10.1.4 to 10.2.1 allowed me to run Jedi Knight II with 4x FSAA and all settings at max in 800x600, rather than 640x480. If I turn FSAA down to 2, I can run it in 1024x768, but it looks better in 800x600.
The system itself is much faster in 10.2, probably at the level it should. But OpenGL needs work.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
I'm so ashamed.
Course, it's still faster then the Optiplex NT 4.0 box I use at work.
still waiting for the windows users to post? heh
i am running an older mac... G4 400mghz running 10.2 with a gig of ram..... i think the pokeyness IS application specific for the most part. i upgraded my Rage128 card to a 7500 when i hopped to 10.2 and noticed it handles the aqua interface a lot better. there are also little things to do to zip up the OS (like under dock prefs switch from "genie" to "scale"), turn off dock magnification, don't use a 10 megapixel picture as your desktop.
obviously it's not as efficient as a very tweaked Linux or BSD box (with fast innards), but as an out of the box OS it's very usable. as always it's better running on newer machines, but i can use it on an older crt iMac G3 300mghz and not bang my head against the table. you might not want to do intense av work on that machine, but for day to day tasks (which iMacs were intended for) it will do just fine.
"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
I am fortunate enough to be using a 400-something mhz G3 with around 384MB RAM and OS 10.2 at work.
I use it primarily for hacking in php, perl, mysql and the likes, which doesn't really require a lot of computational power. I use a lot of photoshop aswell, which is a somewhat different story. I am able to outperform photoshop in using keyboard shortcuts. That is, I experience a (sometimes significant) lag after keying in a keyboard shortcut sequence.
This has however little to do with the performance of the OS itself, which I find perty darn smooth. To me OS X has always been very responsive in all situations though programs (photoshop, golive etc.) take can take some seconds to start up. Apart from this the overall filehandling and mucking about is done with ease.
My two mere cents.
naah sig schmig
Moshe Bar has written an article at Byte in which he benchmarks and compares performance between Mac OS X and Linux at various tasks on the same hardware.
I run OS X on several machines. The one I'm using now is the slowest I really use (a 400MHz G3), and it's fine with 512MB of memory. With 128MB it's slow. More didn't make much difference for common stuff.
:-)
In fact, it's deceptively responsive. I use a G4 733 at home, and sometimes forget how slow this thing is- until I do a big compile or something.
For ordinary GUI stuff, it's OK, but some programs that aren't really OS Xish (like Mozilla) sometimes have noticeable screen updates.
ab
from Windows to OS X, because of the UNIX underneath.
Let me just tell you that the networking is faster on the Mac than on windows, I can play higher quality streams without the constant re-buffering that I had in Windows.
I've got Mozilla, Chimera, and IE on theis machine, I use Mozilla the most - but that is changing, I like the look and feel of Chimera a lot it is growsing on me.
I do alot of surfing, and web development, and I am finding the mac to be faster in starting up applications than the windows boxes I've used...
Just my $.02
It will take an extra minute to boot up but all your OS 9 apps will run immediately.
When talking about OS X 10.1 was slow on my G4 Tower 733, 10.2 is lightning fast (another reason it should have been a free upgrade to 10.1 users).
You must have a bum machine or maybe you only have 128M of RAM. I've found OS-X to be pretty responsive even on older hardware, at least on par with linux+Gnome or native freebsd on similar systems. The one exception may be memory. Many OS-X Cocoa apps have a large memory footprint, and once you start swapping, things go downhill fast. Similarly if you have an old slow hard-drive application launching will be slow. My 667Mhz tibook easily performs as fast as or faster than my 1G PIII laptop at virtually every task.
John Soward...University of Kentucky
... but it can be slower (not to mean its unusable) for certain things, mostly to do with graphics. Web browsing for instance. Some of the browsers are better and some are worse, but from my experience all are noticably slower than browsing with IE, Netscape, et al on Win or Linux.
Part of the reason may be that I'm running a Rage iBook and don't have the ability to take advantage of QuarkGL. And things are getting faster with each OS update.
Having said all that my iBook is my primary machine. I wouldn't trade it for the world (except for a faster one, or a TiBook)
Anyone have opinions/stats on the idea that OSX might be slower because of file-based instead of device-based swap? From what little bits I've read/seen, OSX is using a swapfile instead of your typical direct-to-char-device swapdisk. And I do know file-based swap can be slower because it's going through both the filesystem and drive io layers.
Is there a vmstat? Can anyone confirm/deny? Every time I see X speed questions/concerns this is the first thing I wonder. Or has someone an idea where to find swap comparisions between PPC/Linux, PPC/BSD (I presume there is such a thing) and OSX? If nothing else, I'd satisfy personal curiosity.
-fester
-'fester
OS X is fairly memory intensive. Anyone interested in speed should, IMO, max out their memory. After all, moving from the minimum amount of memory (128mb) to the maximum (640mb) on the low-end iBook costs you $200 and is well worth it.
Also, with Quartz Extreme adding additional amounts of video RAM seems to make a difference, since the graphics card is doing a lot more work in day-to-day life. 32mb seems to be noticably better than 16mb, with diminishing returns expected as you go up.
Just my opinions, yadda yadda...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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?
As I'm sure many of the people about to post here do, I use several different OSs during the course of my day. Once I leave work, I rely on OSX for me personal machine. Even with 10.1.5, almost everything seems faster than any flavor of Windows that I come into contact with. My home machine is a "lowly" Dual 533 G4 with a Gig of RAM, and it consistently performs better than any of my other machines... ranging from a dual 600 Pentium w/ NT4 to 2GHZ AMD w/ XP. I am running mostly Multimedia creation software, so maybe that's where the results come from... Anyway, OSX is plenty fast... except for some strange spinning beachball zone-outs at weird times. To be honest, even though I am one of those Mac people that will break a bottle on the bar and hold it to your throat for bad-mouthing my system... I am perfectly functional with Windows going all the way back to 3.11. Bottom line: OSX on a sufficiently pumped up G4 will get the job done, and get it done pretty quickly. Now back to the impending flame war...
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
My family is mostly Mac now -- my mom and sister have them, and I have one in part so I can follow their explanations when troubleshooting by phone.
... it's nice to have it in there full time, no card-edge to worry about snapping off ...)
And overall, now that I've made the switch (from 9 to X) more-or-less permanently wrt time spent on my iBook, I've stopped caring. The system is nice, and with Chimera and Mozilla (giving me browsing and IRC), I no longer feel any great need to boot into 9 for the speed.
Yes, it is slowish -- my old 366MHz ThinkPad 600 with 128MB RAM is *snappier* running Windowmaker or even KDE than my 500MHz iBook (with 384MB) running OS 10.2, but I find the speed differenceis not terribly annoying. And 10.2 is noticeably faster than 10.1, and esp. faster than 10.0.1
The Apple keyboard I could do without, but that's not really the OS's fault.
I prefer (for various reasons) any of several Linux desktops for day-to-day use, but the iBook, even this slow one, makes a nice station for editing home movies, 802.11 access, etc. (I wish other companies would license that airport space inside the machine
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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"
My 700Mhz iBook running OSX 10.2 is quite snappy with all native apps, especially the ones I compile myself. It feels comparable to my 1.4Ghz Athlon running Redhat 8.0.
If you run MacOS 9 apps in compatibility mode, the feel is more sluggish, but that's to be expected. Emulation almost always degrades performance.
Openoffice.org for MacOSX is quite nice, BTW.
10.0.0 Public Beta was barely usable, in every way. It was beyond slow. It was almost a toy. The genie effect took forever.
10.0.0 release was slow. It was a pain.
10.1.0 was improved; my machines are quite old, and it showed.
10.1.5 was improved; as the last of the 10.1 branch, it showed improvement.
10.2 brought a noticeable improvement. I wasn't spurting my shorts but I could not recommend it to others without hesitation, with the exception of the guys that buy a new CPU every time AMD or Intel comes out with one, because the old was one "just too slow". Whatever.
Is everyone seeing the trend? Getting better all the time. I forgot who did the presentation, but the quote was along the line of, "We have to improve in software because we can't trust Motorola to speed up the hardware". Each new release boosts performance on the same hardware with no noticeable new bugs or problems (other than what Apple introduces on purpose, like breaking LiteSwitch w/ 10.2).
In short: it's sad that the unacceptable performance of older versions, esp. betas, has tainted a great OS with the moniker "slow".
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Maybe the clean install fixed it.
I have a G3-333 w/192MB and it runs 10.1 and 10.2 painfully slow, but OS 8, 8.6 and 9.2 are lightning fast.
Maybe you need a clean 9.2 install (or to patch it). When I bought my G4 Tower (733) 10.1 was really slow compared to OS 9. In fact I liked 9 better than 10.1 until 10.2 was released.
The funny thing is when you run an application on OS X that is "classic", it uses the OS 9 look and fell and is blazingly fast, so what's slow about Mac OS X is Aqua. It is slightly ahead of the hardware available. With a constantly patched video driver on a 3Ghz Intel box, I bet it would be just as fast as Windows. The world may never know.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
It really depends on what you're planning on doing with it, and also if you're using a "stock" hardware configuration.
Case in point:
A 15" LCD iMac G4/700 "feels" much slower than my tricked out G4/450... here's why:
* 256 megs of RAM is absolutely inadequate for OS X, but I've been too lazy to order non-insanely priced RAM online for it yet (weird module, mega $$$ at the neighborhood instant-gratification superstore).
* Sometimes the stock hard drives on consumer-level machines are horribly slow (5400 RPM vs 7200 vs SCSI 10k makes a HUGE difference).
That said, my G4/450 is flying with a new Maxtor 80GB ATA/133, a clean install of 10.2 and 1.5 GB RAM.
Flying, meaning that I usually notice the machine running faster than in did in OS 9. And this is a dual-head setup to boot doing 3D and Photoshop work all day in addition to coding.
So that said, no OS X isn't slow -- but don't expect the machine to get out of passing gear without at least a RAM upgrade. Consider an extra 512mb chip $85 very well spent.
10.2 is very, very, very nice and a substantial speed improvement over 10.1. It "feels" as fast as OS 9 did now.
But then, to me, XP Pro running on a P4/1.4 laptop feels like it's dragging ass, so YMMV.
--dr00gy
Moshe Bar says: "The fact that OS X needs to improve in VM and I/O handling is understandable given its relatively young age." That is his opinion from testing XServe. (Note there was things he could have done to improve the test, but on a whole it was a good test.)
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 have a 400mhz G4 at work with 384mb ram and a 500 mHz ibook at home with 192 mb of ram. now that i'm running jaguar (10.1 had some slowness on my ibook) EVERYTHING is super fast with the exception of MOZILLA chimera is still too unpolished to use (i'm a web developer) so i need to use netscape (ie on the mac is a just a nest of javascript bugs). please please please mozilla...make this wonderful browser (which i am using right now) work faster in os x somehow!
It all depends on what you're doing and how much you're doing of it. At work, I have a Dell Optiplex GX150 with a 1GHz PIII processor, if I'm not mistaken. This system has 256MB of RAM and runs Win2K SP3.
Typically, if I have 4 apps open (Outlook, SciTE*, Phoenix or Moz, PuTTY*) - when I launch IE, its unbearably slow - the screen redraws visibly and the system is generally unresponsive for the ~5 seconds it takes IE to launch. Not sure what causes this - 256MB of RAM is obviously part of the problem, but the swap file shouldn't be that slow, either.
Recently (this past Tues.) I was at home working on a few different things - ripping CDs to AIFF w/ Audion 3.0.2 (in batch mode), backing up 10GB of data from a ~19GB partition on a FW drive to a 8x4x32 CD-RW in an external FW enclosure (Dantz Retrospect Express), editing PHP files in BBEdit (6.5.2), updating site files in Dreamweaver MX whenever my partner needed something updated, checking mail via Chimera/Mozilla using Horde/IMP (web mail access), maintaining a connection to an FTP site (authenticated) and SSH site (publickey) for files I was editing in BBEdit and for Apache log files I was copying down to run through the Summary.net analyzer which was also running and serving out log stats to two clients who wanted temporary stats on certain logs (not available on our main server). Summary was also doing DNS lookups and crunching log file entries in the background while everything else was going on.
Now - was my computer slow? Well, Chimera/Moz seems to have a bug in entering data into text areas when the system is under high-load - that was unbearable. Otherwise, besides having to wait a couple seconds to switch desktops (using Space.app), other apps responded just fine. The multi-tasking on OS X is first rate, it really is. I managed to rip through ~15 CDs that day, in about an 8 hr time frame, while I had an amazingly productive day otherwise.
I'm running a classic iMac DV at 400MHz with a G3 system, unaccelerated by Quartz Extreme, as my AGP card only has 8MB of video RAM. If I can be productive on a system like this (and I have a pretty low ctrl-alt-del threshold, as a former prof used to call it) - then you ought to be just fine with one of the 15" iMacs running at ~700MHz with a G4 processor (which has Altivec - amazing, don't ignore that) and a few other enhancements over my machine.
Slow is all in the eye of the beholder. I know people that always use the fastest of the fastest machines from Intel when they come out. People like that will never be satisfied. I've had this iMac for almost 3 yrs now and every release of OS X has run faster (noticeably). Menus pop out faster, Finder responds faster, file searches execute faster, applications launch faster - the works. I look forward to my next hardware upgrade, just like the next guy, but for being productive - I can kick ass on my machine, and I give a lot of credit to OS X. My productivity is limited in various fashions on my Win2K machine at work - crashes cause some delays, but more minor annoyances cause far more delays.
Cheers.
actually, in all seriousness, if you have G4 processor and 256 or more of ram, you'll have no trouble.
In terms of UI speed, for macs running quartzgl, the differences between windows, mac os x, and linux are more or less just religious. My dad has an eMac that I could never complain about. App speed is... highly app specific. Some apps are ungodly slow for unknown reasons. It doesn't seem tied to carbon/cocoa. A large minority of bad apps are just oddly slow. Whatever.
For macs w/o quartzgl capable graphics cards, UI frequently bogs down the processor and makes even non UI performance pretty mediocre. Kill the GUI and run X, and you're doing pretty well in terms of speed. Not that you'd likely want to make that trade.
My 600 mHz ibook is the fastest mac I've ever owned, and it feels really slow because of the window manager. But I love it and my PCs are collecting dust anyway. If you get a new machine with a G4 and a real graphics card, I'm sure you'll never complain. The last two revisions of ibook have been quartzgl compatible, so I imagine they're not too bad either.
Yeah. Subjective.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
So then, it is inconceivable to you that Apple might not have progressed in the ten years since you last looked at one of their products? That seems a little silly, since we both know that other personal computers have progressed.
Remember, these comments on OSX all based on 10.1.5, not 10.2 (Jaguar.)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Simple file moving operations can take FOREVER if you are moving around hundreds of files. Though I haven't tried it, I am sure that from the command line, it could be a blink of the eye.
.zip files, and move them to another folder that already contains 3000 MAME ROM .zip files. Some may exist already and need to be overwritten and some files are new ones.
Example: Select, say 600 MAME ROM
An operation like this on Windows takes very little time to do. MacOS X can take many minutes to do the same. I don't understand why. This is on a G3 500Mhz iMac DV w/1GB RAM.
The underlying OS is very fast. The GUI/Finder needs all the help it can get. Even after 10.1 and 10.2!
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
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 have no idea, but the trend is noticeable.
Could be a memory problem, not a CPU problem. MAC memory is is crappy and $$$ (or used to be - I used to wholesale chips but got out 3 years ago).
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Ive got both running OS X the Ti has Jag on it and the G3 10.1.5, and there is very little difference in the speed of the two. I find that OS X runs fast enough for all of my needs. I have never had a problem running OS X since 10.1 came out.
I have the 700Mhz iBook that comes with 128 megs of built-in RAM. It took an awful long time to open explorer, longer for netscape 7, and pretty long for even a terminal. Last week I bought a 512 stick from Crucial and now the thing just kicks ass in every way. I can't believe how much more enjoyable it is to use now.
And for anyone that wants enjoyment, I offer the following equation:
iBook + 640MBs RAM + Airport + Pokerroom.com + Monday Night Football on 53" TV = Awesome
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
I drove a Model-T once. Was slower than my horse. Haven't driven a car since.
It is still missing some features I like and is obviously still under development. But the recently released 0.6 version is pretty amazing.
..and now running Mac OS X 10.2.1 on a Powerbook G4 DVI 667MHz - yes, sometimes I find things slower than what I'm used to. Sure, browsing the web isn't as snappy as running Galeon was on my Thinkpad R30 Celeron 900 MHz. No matter which browser I now use. Internet Explorer is a lot slower, Chimera is quite a lot faster than the former but still not as snappy as, for example, Galeon. And, sure, running Java applications is still slow compared to the Windows equivavelt.
But still - it doesn't slow me down. I don't feel irritated because it would be slow. It's not something I think about. It doesn't bother me. It's not two words I connect. Mac OS X. Slow.
And, of course - define slow. Everyone will have a different opinion about this one. I'd say it's not slow because it's not slowing me down in my work.
I would like to separate slow and not as snappy.
Leif.
OS X is very very slow at some things on my 400Mhz G3 iMac w/ 512MB RAM. But it's only slow with things like loading webpages, opening programs, and scrolling windows. You know, the kind of things people hardly ever do anyway. Other stuff, like moving the cursor side to side and dragging icons around is just as fast as OS 9, I swear.
Seriously though, OS X is very good at doing more than one thing at once and I/O throughput for network, firewire, USB, etc. is very much improved over OS 9. The feeling when switching back to OS 9 is that it is much snappier, but I find myself less productive in 9 because I tend to use many programs simultaneously and OS X excels here, even on a slow iMac. Hell, I even use OS X on my old 9500/333Mhz G3 and it is DOG slow but I still like it better than 9. The key to remember is that OS 9 is fast because it is highly geared toward doing one thing at a time as fast as possible, and other key fact about OS 9 is that it completely sucks balls. (I am totally qualified to say this because it is true)
From my experience, OS 10.0 and the beta were extremely slow. However, 10.1 and 10.1.5 were tons faster. 10.2 is noticably faster again.
At this point, I consider it to be a pretty zippy OS. Go to a mac store or a Comp USA and test drive them. The interface feels good and responsive. People that complain about it being slow might be running it on a slow machine, might not have played with it since 10.0, etc. Or perhaps little transistions and such like the genie effect make it feel slow to some people that aren't used to them.
My personal machine is a B&W G3 that I've upgraded to a G4 550. It has 256MB of ram and a rage orion (rage 128). 10.2 runs fine on it. I have very few complaints. (If I don't buy a Tibook soon I'll be putting a Radeon into it though. The video leaves a little bit to be desired).
Typically, I see the OS X behave slowly in Finder more than anything else. Within applications, I don't see much (if any) performance hit, but when switching to finder or minimizing a window, OS X can be very slow sometimes. This has improved a lot from 10.0, but it is still MUCH slower than OS 9.
Application launch time is another area in which Apple needs to work on. They instituted a new pre-binding mechanism into jagwire, but it has had very little effect on launch time.
I'm going to try and be objective here. I've run a variety of machines over the years, I used to be militantly pro-linux, although since I've graduated I interact daily with machines running Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows 2000, Windows 98, etc etc.
:).
I tried OS X because I heard great things about it, I really needed a notebook, and configuring linux was beginning to take up too much of my time. It takes signifigant effort to maintain and tweak linux, and the temptation is too much to ignore. The titanium powerbook was sexy, offered true instant on, and would run long enough to let me code for 4 hours on a charge. That's what sucked me in. I think it's a great os, it has great integrated development tools and documentation bar none. It is expensive, but so is my time.
That said, OS X is still a lot slower than a comparable machine running windows or linux. Programs run fine - never had a problem there. It shows in the Finder, mainly. Explorer is something windows did right, and it is very, very, very, very, very fast compared to finder. Put a few hundred files in a directory and launch finder, and you will be waiting. The graphics were a little laggy in 10.1, but that has been solved with Quartz Extreme in 10.2. The transparency is really quite beautiful, and doesn't come at a cpu hit. This is on a second generation 550mhz Tibook, so it is comparable to the machines asked about here.
Finder is slow. There are reasons for that, but finder is very, very slow. People who have run macs all the time will not notice it, people with large number of files moving from windows will be driven insane.
Trust me.
Yes, everything else makes up for it
The command prompt, sweet, sweet bash, is lightning fast, so I don't usually notice. The rest of the OS is acceptable, and the slow finder is definately tolerable given how nice a machine this is otherwise. I'll be upgrading to a 1ghz powerbook in the new year, and it'll be faster still, but the finder is still going to be dog slow compared to windows. Office, Mozilla, everything - they run great. I really like the Tibook, but I'll say it again - finder is very slow.
This appears to be a software issue, and I hope it will be resolved. Mac people can be in denial or refuse to accept things, and I really love my powerbook - it's my primary machine, when I'm not doing something on my workstation. That's job specific to vhdl or pspice - most EDA tools, used to make the toys you all love, are windows 2000 based now.
Forget about making use of a directory with 500 mp3's in it. It ain't gunna happen on a mid range machine.
Please fix this apple! Otherwise, it's a great OS, but remember it hasn't hit it's second major revision yet. There is definate room for improvement, and I hope I will see it soon.
My $0.02.
..don't panic
Earlier versions of OS X were pretty slow relative to Classic. It's sped up considerably since then, but the reputation persists.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I upgraded my wife's iMac 333 from OS8 to OS10.1 and it was definately slower. But then I got her a new 800Mhz G4 and OS10.2 screams. The thing boots in like 10 seconds and the apps are wicked fast.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
On my G4, with classic running, OS X takes a big hit and gets kind of jerky. I'd say, if you're not useing a classic app constantly, to leave it off. It boots in about 10 seconds anyway.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
My wife and I both use our iMac (G3 500, 256M RAM) for multimedia work (she does voice work, I do graphics and some audio) and OSX outperforms OS9.2 on the same system. I don't find it slow for anything. I use Linux on my main box, she uses Win2K, and the OSX holds it's own just fine.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Their Java implementation rocks. Cocoa applications are fast. The Aqua UI is snappy, epecially considering what it's doing.
Consider this: Aqua renders everything in PDF. It make perfect use of anti aliasing, shadows, fading, zooming and window effects. It does what KDE, Gnome and Windows users only dream of being able to do. And at what price? In general, the UI is as snappy as MS Windows or X-Windows. Acutally, in some senses it's faster and it is stable. In my experience, this GUI is just as fast as Windows and KDE and Gnome, while doing a hell of a lot more than any of these other interfaces do to paint a pretty picture.
OS X isn't slow. Aqua isn't slow. PPC chips aren't slow. This OS and GUI kick ass.
If you are a Mac OS X user and feel the GUI is slow, I have to two recommendations:
Both of these help immensely with any speed issues you may be having. RAM definitely makes the biggest improvements.
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 ?
To be more specific, OSX 10.2 on a 1G Tibook with 512M RAM is slow. The UI feels sluggish and unresponsive, and while I spent only about 30 seconds in an hour watching the spinny-cursor thing, it seemed to take a long time to respond to my keypresses, clicks, etc. The only application I used enough to notice speed was Word (which was ungodly slow - I could type faster than it could spellcheck), though I'm perfectly willing to blame Microsoft for that. I will admit that I'm unfamiliar with OSX and that may contribute to my perception of slowness (in particular, I hate how clicking on something in the dock doesn't do anything, and then a half-second later or whatever, after I've clicked 4 more times, it starts to bounce. And bounce. And bounce.) though I can't blame an anti-mac attitude, as I went in hoping and expecting the tibook to be as cool as the specs indicated. Now if only I could find a demo Toshiba Portege and an IBM X-series to look at too...
This is compared to Redhat Linux or Windows 2000 on a 667mhz Duron with 768M SDR RAM on a KT133 chipset.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
On my Beige G3/266 with 320 MB of ram, it was usable but slow enough to be painful at times. Certain operations were worse than others. I only ran as far as 10.1.5 on that machine.
I now have a Dual 1.25 GHZ G4 with 1 GB of RAM and the speed is as good as I could want it to be.
In some cases I think the animation gives the OS the illusion of being slower than it really is. If that was completely turned off it might be percieved to be much faster.
However even if there is a tradeoff in speed vs OS 9, I think that the stability and features (unix command line, better networking, etc) makes it well worth the switch to Mac OS X.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Is it a little bit slower than a 4 GHz Pentium IV running Linux with no window manager? For most things, of course. But that's not what I'm assuming you're comparing against. Its speed is very nice on my PowerBook, and it certainly never slows me down. In all seriousness, go to a CompUSA or AppleStore if there's one near you. If at CompUSA, try to talk to one of the guys wearing a shirt with a silver Apple logo on his back; he works for Apple rather than CompUSA. Tell him you are curious about the responsiveness of OS X, and ask to play with it. Then do. I don't think you'll be disappointed,
I have had pretty good experience using many different operating systems.. I use Linux & Windows on a daily basis, and I have had experience with a few different versions of MacOS and a few different flavours of UNIX.
I think it has improved with age.. my opinion comes in three parts.
My first experiences with OSX were with when it was still relatively new.. I remeber getting my hands on a Titanium iBook with an earlier version of OSX on it, and I absolutely loathed it. I had a little click around, enjoying the eye candy.. but then I tried to play a DVD on this fresh out of the box system and I was getting locks and freezes, the system was slow and unresponsive - I was really let down as I had been looking forward to trying OSX for a long time.
Since then, I was given the task of putting OSX on some more Titanium iBooks - I believe it was at revision 10.1 then... I pretty much decided after installing a few of them that OSX was a fantastic operating system - it was vastly improved in so many ways. Faster, more reliable, and even DVD player worked properly. The downside was that even with 512MB of RAM, the system still struggled from time to time - and I even got an out of memory error.
Most recently I got a chance to use a Dual G4 system stacked with 1GB of RAM, preloaded with 10.2 Jaguar.. this seemed to be the best version yet. Very quick, very flexible, and very stable..
Though my biggest concern was that it took that much horse power to make OSX run nicely - I wonder how it performs on lower models?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I happen to have a 15" iMac. 800 mhz G4, 768 MB of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.2.1. Anyhow... here's the scoop on me.
:)
I had an Athlon 1.x Ghz up until last December with all the bells and whistles a gamer could reasonably want. XP Home started freaking out on me and after a while and many calls to Microsoft I basically determined it was beyond repair for me. I've been using computers and building my own since probably 94-95 or so so I should've been able to fix anything reasonable. I'm pretty sure ultimately it was a hardware problem but I was fed up with Windows anyhow so I just sold the whole thing except the motherboard/processor (everything else worked fine).
No more computer for me I said.
Then I saw the iMac. It had style. Maybe person X doesn't like it because it looks like a lamp or a funny hat or whatever, but it's certainly unique and has some style. And I knew it had Unix underneath that pretty screen. I had tried various releases of Linux but it seemed like after the many days of tweaking would ultimately end in me booting into Windows anyway. No point in that. But the iMac came with Unix (BSD, Darwin, whatever you wanna call it, that's not the point) installed on it.
So I bought it. And it arrived. I took it outta the box and was even more impressed with the real thing. Within minutes I was literally up and online and everything worked. I really was amazed.
The above is mainly to establish that I used to use Windows, dabbled in Linux, and am recently a novice Mac freak. So now more onto the question at hand.
Of course all the iApps run well. Not a problem there. I have never ever ever ever ever had a coaster CD or DVD from this machine. This happened quite frequently with my PC. While burning a CD under Mac OS X I've been able to browse the internet, watch quicktime, etc no problem even. I *think* once I even played an OpenGL game to see if I could make it make a coaster. No dice though. This makes me happy. A coaster for a CD isn't that big a deal but coaster DVD's at $4-$5 a pop can stink.
Why do I have 768 MB of RAM in it? To run Windows 2000 with Virtual PC. Windows 2000 does run slow. It works but it runs slow. For my correspondence classes I'm taking right now I need to program in VC++ so I went and got Virtual PC. VC++ is the only thing I use Virtual PC for.
I recently purchased Macromedia Flash MX. Works like a charm. I don't notice it being slow in the least.
Exporting DVD's from iDVD can take a while. But I don't really have a comparison on the PC so that's probably not too helpful.
I've rendered some Bryce here and there and it doesn't take any longer than on my Athlon machine that I used to have. I won't say it's faster but I know it's not slower.
Games that my machine meets or exceeds the specs for work just like they did on the PC. The Mac does have games... you can get them from gogamer.com and adobe.com...
Encoding to MP3 doesn't take any longer. Converting movie files takes the same amount of time.
I dunno. Overall I'm impressed with OS X. It took me a while to realize that it wasn't the computer I was happy with but it was the OS that I was happy with. If you live close to an Apple store I'd reccommend checking them out for yourself or finding a friend that'll admit to having one.
As far as speed goes I think they're decently on par with x86 machines. They might be a tad slower. But unless every single day you're going to render video, does it really matter? All I usually do is browse the internet, download stuff, play the occasional game, IM, etc. If you want to play every new game that comes out I'd say get a PC because you can upgrade that easier long term I think. Or if you daily intend to do super intensive tasks. But for most users any small slowdown that a OS X does is worth the benefit of which in my opinion, is a better OS.
It's like I told my friend the other day... I might have a *insert crappy but dependable car name* and you might have a *insert fast but non-dependable car name*... but odds are, neither of us are gonna very much over highway speeds so who cares if you can go twice as fast as I am if you never will.
Mod it "-1, Flamewar".
Honestly, this story is just screaming for people to say: "Yes it is" or "No it ain't".
"Is Mac OS X Slow?" Sorry...
Compared to what? Compared to what hardware? Compared to what OS? Heck, remember that there isn't even any other architecture people can run MacOS X on (thanks to Apple) to compare. So how do you want to separate if a) MacOS X is slow b) the hardware it runs on is slow or c) none of the above?
Just wondering.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
I had a G4/533 with a gig of RAM. General performance is just fine, non graphical applications like Apache, gzip, etc would have performance up to par with the same software on any other OS and/or platform.
... 1995.
... it doesn't anti-alias/scale/whatever, and it scrolls and resizes fast. Although this feature might not be needed if QE absolutely solves the above problems. But wait, my G4's Rage 128 pro wouldn't work with QE.
The main problem was the graphics rendering. I haven't tried Quartz Extreme, but on 10.1, things like scrolling in Mozilla (this includes Chimera) or IE were just sluggish. Scrolling a web page, in the Intel world, should only be sluggish if you're using a Pentium 100 with an non-accelerated graphics card.
Resizing a window in OSX has the same issues as scrolling. The last time a Windows or Linux user experienced sluggishness and frame skipping when resizing a simple file manager or browser window was like
I think what OSX needs is a means to bypassing the graphics pipeline for certain operations. One way I did this was by loading up IE for OS9 in OSX
The kind of UI sluggishness I describe is a really hard pill to swallow for a traditional PC user like me. I switched, but after a year ended up switching back. It's just like the time I bought an SGI, once I got over the fact that "wow, I own an SGI workstation!", it quickly became a cool purple doorstop. Once you get over having "real" transparent terminals, all you're left with is a slow user interface. Maybe OSX is a couple years ahead of its time?
1) if you open a shell and start ripping or gzipping or compiling, it's plenty fast enough. Building programs from source archives (via Fink) is plenty fast. The window manager is superfast. Most everything is fast enough that I don't get hung up on its speed.
2) Once you use up free memory with a bunch of open apps and start swapping, performance degrades a bit, but it's still useable. this is pretty similar to X/Linux behaviour. However, there are a lot of huge heavyweight apps on OS X, so using up free memory can happen. I usually have Mail, OmniWeb, SSH-Agent, Stickies, Terminal and iTunes open even before i've started "working". If I add in Photoshop, Illustrator 10, and Preview, i'm on the edge.
3) There are a couple of gawdawfully slow applications out there. apple's iCal calendar program is beautifully designed but it's drastically slower than any of the other apple iApps! I think it must be written in visual basic or something. This is not the OS's fault, but it sure behooves Apple to fix this sort of problem because it reflects poorly on them. The apple address book is also kinda slow, and the new iSync public beta is way too slow. (hopefully they'll address that in the final release.) MS Office X is ultra-slow and a piece of crap to boot! Fortunately i can revert to running Office 98 in os 9 emulation, which is both faster and, frankly, better designed and more useful software.
4) Windows has always put a premium on a quick UI, and it's one of the things they've done right in the past; but i have a Sony Vaio running Windows XP (Xcrement-Polish) with the same amount of memory as my mac and a "faster" processor, and it's a slow puppy. Slow to open a folder, slow to launch an app, slow to shut down, slow to connect to the network. Slow all over, in fact. The original poster of this thread admitted that he had to go in and hotrod XP in order to get decent performance out of it. that's comparing apples to lemons. out of the box, OS X is faster.
Laf, I already got modded down. I didn't realize Janie was a fan of /.
Live web cams
I haven't dismissed OS X yet. When it's matured as much as Windows 2K has, then I think it will really shine.
I have a 900MHz PowerPC, running MacOS X "Jaguar." I am a programmer, but I have not developed anything for OS X, so I can only offer my opinion as a user.
Is the OS slow? I think it depends on what aspect you're talking about. Overall, I have to say, no, it's not a slow OS.
At times, the GUI seems a little sluggish. Windows don't always pop as rapidly as one might be accustomed to on a comparable PC running NT/200/XP. I understand that Quartz can be pretty demanding of CPU and graphics processor time (or at least the latter).
I browse occasionally from this box, and it is my subjective opinion that network performance may not be the swiftest. However, I haven't studiously timed anything, and I haven't taken into account the network it is attached to (like eliminating the long wire run I did, the cheap hub it's plugged into, and attaching it directly to my broadband modem). This subjective impression may also be influenced by vague memories of some posts to Macintouch.com concerning sluggish network performance.
I run strictly audio apps on my Mac. It's easily apparent to me that the audio facilities of MacOS X are anything BUT slow. More like "jaw-dropping." My main app is eMagic Logic 5, and it is astounding what it can do. The amount of data that it can process in realtime - at least some of it courtesy of OS X Core Audio functionality - is amazing. If OS X was a slug in all departments, we wouldn't be enjoying such incredible performance. It's clear to me that the process-handling facilities of OS X (scheduler, etc) and the audio libraries are definitely up to par, at least inasmuch as they don't get in the way of the PowerPC and its Altivec.
Looking forward to reading other responses to this topic.
Every time I post a question about clustering, I get a fury of posts about how I should "imagine a beowulf cluster of these". Sould I take this personally? Are these posters doubting my ability to visualize clustering technology? And what do Natalie Pr0tman and hot grits have to do with anything?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
So what if it's slow? It's a new OS and you should buy a new computer for it. Why would anyone buy new hardware if everything works okay on there old machine? It just wouldn't make sense. I think Apple made a good decision on this one, although I'm not a fan.
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.
I'm running 10.1 on my Powerbook G3/400 (Lombard), and it runs fine. A co-worker with the same model Powerbook has 10.2 and praised the overall performance boost it gave his system.
For comparison, 10.1 is much faster than the Debian installation I had on the same system.
Details for the terminally bored: Linux was slow enough that I rarely bothered to boot into it. FWIW, I've heard that the Linux performance issues were largely X and/or driver related. I've used and enjoyed Linux systems at work and at home, but this experience was at best a 'D-' on Linux's platform support report card, IMO.
For the record: a clean install of OS 9 has the illusion (note my word choice) of being about twice to three times the speed of Mac OS X if you have been in OS X for a length of time. This is true pretty much regardless of what machine you are installing on. On the other hand, it also has about the architectural maturity of Windows 3.1, and if you start installing a ton of extensions, its speed starts going down the tube. This is why you see OS 9 as slow and others see it as fast.
Has anyone seen the new accessibility feature for users with visual impairment? The OS will magnify, on the fly, any part of the screen up to something like 24x... fully anti-aliased. The magnification follows the mouse pointer, and as you move it around the screen there is no hesitancy at all.
Thanks to how it's implemented, using command-tab to switch applications is almost useless because the system flashes the Dock icons too quickly to see what program is next. And don't forget the always-fun demo of clicking 5 or 6 dock icons in quick succession, only to watch all the programs launch and draw their interfaces simultaneously in just a few seconds.
I don't think there is anything in the OS that slows down its responsiveness to the user. If someone wants to get into the power of the hardware -- running benchmarks and such -- that's a whole other argument. But it has little to do with "MacOS is slow".
Since my iBook2 (600MHz) can't handle the new Quartz rendering in Jaguar, I'm left with a functional - but still slowish - interface under OS X.
In general, though, I get the best of both worlds by running Mac-on-linux, which runs OS X beautifully (all except sound....) with a simple Ctrl-Alt-F8...
Scott
This is the second flamebait ask slashdot in as many days. Just like the "OSS or commercial more expensive?" thing from yesterday, this is way too generic a question.
What do we have for tomorrow's ask slashdot? Better color: red or blue?
Yes, I find the UI slow. Things have improved somewhat, but when I was running 10.1 on a 450MHz G3, I could run XDarwin, ssh to my Linux box and run KDE remotely across the LAN, and everything except moving windows around seemed quicker in KDE across the network than on OSX locally.
Mac OS 9 on the same hardware certainly felt MUCH faster than OSX. In fact, OS9 apps running in Classic often felt faster than native apps.
I've since upgraded to a 700MHz G4 and 10.2.1, and it still feels kinda slow, although it's not as bad. I have Terminal.app set to use transparent windows and anti-aliased fonts, which does slow it down, but should I get a spinning beach ball when typing "ls"? Sometimes I do.
That said, the raw hardware is impressive. I can rip a CD to MP3s in about as much time as it takes to play the first track (which it does while ripping). Before RC5-64 completed (and yes I know the README says not to use it as a benchmark) I compared my dual PIII/450 to my single G4/700. The G4 was completing blocks at about 2.5x the speed of the PC (running Linux 2.4).
Anyone have any suggestions for speeding up the UI?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Buy a Mac. Run some apps. Install Yellow Dog on it. Run some apps.
Buy a Mac. Spend the exact same amount of money on the best PC you can get. Run some apps on the Mac. Run some apps on the PC under your favorite operating system.
Personally, I think #2 is perfectly fair, since Apple stopped allowing clones to license the OS for third-party hardware, and I think #2 is what most people are complaining about WRT speed. I doubt that most people get to the second half of #1 -- if you're buying Mac hardware, you're doing it to run Mac software.
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.
I've been using OS X on a G4/450 (dual processor) since it came out. The first couple of versions were slow. For example, iTunes encoded at 1-2x in 10.0. Now, under 10.2, it rips/encodes at 12-14x.
I've never used an OS with such good multitasking. I can have LimeWire downloading, an iMovie rendering, and responsive web browsing all at the same time (granted, I do have 704MB of RAM).
With 10.2, application speed and overall performance is great, but it still gives an impression of slowness. Little things like brief delays before a window opens or closes do a lot to make the machine seem slow.
My G4 perked up a lot after upgrading to 10.2, but nowhere near as much as the Dual 1 GHz G4 we have at the office. Its video card is supported by Quartz Extreme; my old Rage 128 isn't.
I have a G4/450 @ 512MB running 10.2 that had the ATI Rage-pro in it. (Non QE compatible)
It was far, far slower than Photoshop 6 in OS 9 native. Even Photoshop 6 running inside Classic was about 30% faster.
I purchased a Radeon 8500 64MB card (~$200) and it's added a new life to my machine. QE's offloading of graphics completely changed my machine, and I've noticed everything is faster.
Photoshop is now on-par with where it was under OS 9. Mind you, I'm on a G4, ymmv.
I'd check and see if your blue and white can take a Radeon card or not, that might do the trick for you.
I think people feel OS X is slow because of the GUI. most code executes quickly, esp command line stuff and photoshop. But the click and the machine jumps feel just isn't there. You get used to it.
I love OSX, but on my 450MHz G4, it is quite annoying to use in comparison to OS9. I don't think older Mac users want to bash the OS, but want more of a reason to stay away from the DarkSide. OS9 felt very snappy to use, while X does not, at least on older hardware. Rendering and what not may be the same if not better (AfterFX : FCP3); most time on a system is spent navigating it! I also agree that OSX is MUCH more stable, but so was OS/2. Don't see a Warp Switch campaign! I hope not to bash, but let Apple know what we want... I never remember any complaints about OS9 being almost unusable coming from OS8.5. I agree that a lot of switchers are too quick to call foul, but keep in mind that they are seeing Macintosh with new eyes. I think that they should not be ignored. I for one have had my Mac blinders on for quite some time. For the record... M$ is the enemy! Not alternative OS's :-)
..still saving up for a sig..
Yes. Every OS is slow. OS 9, OS X, Linux, Windows XP.
Until the things I want to do happen instantaneously, all are slow. With the computing power we have at our disposal, things should not be weighing down the CPU at all. My Apple IIgs can do some things faster than my new P4!
Frankly, the most responsive OSes I have ever used have been BeOS and windows 95(IE removed), on a P4 1.8.
At work I use os X 10.5 and it gets SCHOOLED by my P3 800 at home; when I installed 10.2, I noticed a huge speed up, but some apps didn't work with it so I had to go back.
Still, BeOS is the fastest os I have ever used.
On my G4-867, things could be faster sometimes, but mostly this seems to be apps, and not the OS. I'm hoping this will improve.
But when it comes to any floating-point stuff (what I got it for in the first place), like Photoshop filters, Final Cut filters, color compisiting etc., it blazes through it like a hot knife through butter, comared to an Intel box.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Since there aren't any good benchmarks for this sort of thing, all you're going to get are subjective comments. As someone who has used Mac OS 9, OS X, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 on a variety of machines, I'm pleased with X's performance.
One thing I did notice when I switched from Mac OS 9 to OS X--the Aqua GUI feels a bit slow. I don't know what causes this perception, but you'll hear users on Mac-centric discussion forums complaining about the lack of "snappiness." In OS 9's Finder (in list view), you could select a hundred files and immediately drag them into another folder. In OS X's Finder (in column view) you have to wait a second after selecting the files or you can't drag them. It's little things like that which matter.
On the other hand, OS X is much better for multitasking. I leave all the apps I commonly use running 24/7. OS 9's primitive memory management made this near impossible, and its pathetic system of assigning processor time to the frontmost application prevented me from even simple multitasking (like coding a Web page while downloading software while listening to an MP3).
I'm running OS X on a 733Mhz PowerMac G4 (digital audio) with 1024 MB RAM and a GeForce 3.
I am using a Powerbook G4 550Mhz running Mac OS X 10.2.1.
I moved from an Athlon 1.33GHz Desktop running RedHat 7.3 with Ximian Desktop, and I also use a IBM Thinkpad T21 running Windows 2000 for work.
the only slowness I seem to notice in my daily usage (email, web surfing, some documents, photo printing) is the load times, and I attribute this to my 4200 RPM hard disk.
Evolution took a while to load on my 1.33Ghz with a 7200RPM Disk drive too. And my Thinkpad is equally doggy.
I don't ever find myself switching off my Powerbook for my thinkpad to do something because of speed. They sit side by side on my desk. The powerbook is in the center.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
What is the bottleneck between a human sitting down in front of a computer and what he ultimately wants to do?
The human interface!
I find a cheap PC running either Windows or Linux to be more expensive than my Macintosh.
time = money
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Along these lines, some people can put up with a much more sluggish UI - thus the "I run OS X on my Mac Classic and it runs fine!" posts. And on the other end of the spectrum, anything less than instantaneous is unacceptable to some people. Again, I think allegiance one way or another can play a part in this.
That said, my own personal opinion is that it's fast enough for me. I run it on a G4 733 MHz tower and a 600 MHz iBook. In general, speed is such a non-issue that I never think about it. I have plenty of things on my wishlist for OS X to improve, and while speed is there, it's not terribly high. I don't find myself ever frustrated by a lack of speed with anything. I use iMovie, iDVD, XDarwin, Mozilla/Chimera, Quicken, iTunes, Terminal, and plenty more pretty extensively. Again, take my hardware, OS version (Jaguar) and personal biases (like Mac, OS X) into account.
Even so, lately the iBook has been taking several seconds to login, where it used to be about 2 seconds when we first got it. Not sure why, but cleaning out ~/Library always seems to help. If not that, then it's probably something in /System or /Library. I'm not too thrilled that OS X seems to exhibit its own version of "registry rot," slowing down over time. I'd like to say that sort of problem only afflicts MS users but it's not my experience with OS X. Hopefully they're working hard on fixing and optimizing this stuff - and before it gets to a point where I do think it's too slow!
Say hello to zMac.
You must have a darn fast horse.
Try BeOS - It boots in about 5-15 seconds. Not kidding.
Of course I think Mozilla is bloatware, but that's me.
Amen to that. Chimera is the Galeon of OS X. (If you're tired of waiting for Mozilla, but like the rendering engine, try one of these...you'll never go back.)
moto411.com
In my experience, there is only one "true" metric that means anything for system speed and that is response time. I define response time as the elapsed time between the time the user issues a command and the time that the command has completed execution. For most people, this translates into the time between when something is mouse-clicked and the time the associated item opens/closes or similar actions.
All other things being relatively equal, I have found Mac OS X (both Jaguar and 10.1.5) to be very responsive. I'm running a TiBook (800 MHz) with 512 Mb RAM and have no complaints whatsoever. In fact, I've found that my productivity has greatly increased (about 25%) since I made my TiBook my primary computer. The standard issue machine at my office is a laptop with an 850 Mhz Mobile P3 processor and 512 Mb RAM running Win98 SE. In the response-time test, the TiBook wins handily.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I have several computers at work. I recently adopted a Blue G3 350 MHz with 512 MB RAM. I installed OS X on this machine. My primary machine is a 300 MHz Pentium 2 with 256 MB RAM.. this one runs Windows XP.
I tried using the OS X machine as my primary computer. I really wanted to. After a couple of days, however, the abject slowness of this computer with OS X was totally unbearable. Windows XP on a 300 MHz Pentium 2 is useable.. some applications may be slow, but the OS is FAR more responsive than OS X on the G3. Web browsing is an order of magnitude faster on the XP machine as well.
...Mac OS X is slow. Or perhaps I should say that Darwin is slow. Or more correctly, I should say that the G4 800 I have is slower than the PIII's I have.
I regularly do Java and Python development, and I run the same scripts and programs on my Mac and on my Pentium III, 500's (running Linux).
With few exceptions, the programs (which are all console-based, BTW, so it has nothing to do with graphics) are always faster on the PIII. Sometimes faster by twice or three times.
While I agree you can't compare megahertz like people do, I don't think the G4 is as fast as Apple says. If it was as fast, why would Apple be offering dual G4's as the standard for their desktops? Why wouldn't they publicize Darwin on Intel vs. Darwin on PPC results?
Having said this, though, I wouldn't trade my mac for an Intel box any day. I love OS X. So it's not as fast for scripts and programs. It is perfectly usable and fast. The graphics are snappy on my laptop (the top of the line 800MHz until this week). I don't notice any speed problems except for repetitive tasks using Python (for example, inserting millions of calculated rows into Postgres). When I encode sorensen or mp4 video speed would be nicer as well.
I love my Mac. It's been a long time since I loved my laptop the way I do this one. Do I wish it were faster? Not for daily use. My Dell sits on my desk unused while my Apple gets used every day.
There are a few things that I do to enhance my OS X experience. I work in Linux systems deployment for a software firm, and spend mucho time at the command line. I *do* think that the Apple Terminal application is a bit slow, so I use Eterm under XDarwin/Gnome for my terminal needs. My other suggestion is installing Launchbar. This program makes every command/application/document/etc. available by typing a few characters. It's highly configurable and allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard for just about every task.
These tools, plus the multitasking ability (versus OS 9's inability) allow me to be more efficient on OS X. Speed doesn't really matter as much, since I can still get my work done.
Oh, and here's a nifty screenshot that illustrates that productivity :)
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
The SystemStarter is brilliant. Along with the start up scripts for various daemons and so on, you list what service it provides and what services it needs started before you start it. The SystemStarter works out a partial order of running these scripts and then does as many as possible in parallel. This gives it the fasted start up of any Unix I've used.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Apple doesn't care very much about European customers. So it's quite hard here to find any store in your neighborhood at all you can have a look at MacOS X in.
(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
My observation is that the comments about X being slow are really related to OS X being slower than, usually, OS 9 on the same hardware. This is, of course, true but it is a lot like saying that Winders NT/2000/XP is slow when compared to Win95 on the same hardware. Unfortunately, features aren't free.
NeXTStep 5.1 (aka OS X 10.0) was a bit slow. Unoptimized, but important to get out the door so developers would get some pressure to compile for OSX which they had ignored for the 4 month Beta period. This strategy of pushing developers was successful with the 128kb Mac that forced developers to use the consistent, common ROM routines rather than writing their own UI as DOS had taught them to do.
10.1 involved lots of work to optimize libraries and make it a bit more than the "Hey, the OS built!" level of quality.
10.2 (NeXTStep 6.1 more or less) is a fairly major step forward and is brisk enough for me. But then, I run a bunch of terminals, iCab or Opera (or mozilla), occasional PhotoShop and that's most of it.
The kernel is finally enabled with debuging so ktrace works. I just wish the thing were OpenSource. Darwin isn't enough. Oh, and real IPv6 support (more than just "ping6") would be useful. NetBSD runs fine, but it would be nice to cvsup from apple, rebuild and go.
Hell, it would be nice to cvsup from RedHat or Suse, run "make build" and go.
If I need speed, I can log into the 8 way SGI at work (from the Mac) and do stuff there.
But looking at the 166MHz BSD SPARC 20 that's the home server, I'm not sure why I need more than the power suckage and heat that 500MHz gives me except for gaming.
I'd rather save the cash for a new machine and get a T1 or more RAM in the current machines.
Let me lead off by stating that I'm running OS X 10.2.2 (Jaguar) on my iBook, and 10.1.5 on my G4 Cube. The reason I haven't yet upgraded the Cube has to do with making sure all the core apps on the Cube are up-to-date so they'll work with Jaguar, and making sure there are no other "gotchas" in Jaguar. (Also, I need to free up more hard disk space on the Cube, since Jaguar eats more disk space.)
/usr/local/bin and having to recompile tinyfugue were both minorly annoying. But the speed improvement, and the ability to browse SMB shares easily, were worth it. My iBook is now a very usable OS X machine, and it's only a 500 MHz G3 machine.
OS X has gotten steadily better, to the point where I never boot my iBook back into OS 9 anymore. I've noticed a few annoyances when upgrading from 10.1.5 to 10.2.X on my iBook -- having to fix my PATH to once again include
My G4 Cube is a workhorse. It sometimes is a little slow to load applications, but once running, they don't seem to drag much at all. (Those who remember NeXTStep may recall that application load times sucked there too.)
One of the few application performance complaints that I have is with (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer. Even after installing the latest 5.2.2 update, I've noticed painfully slow page render times on some sites. I've also noticed bad/wrong rendering (stuff that Netscape gets right, and that IE on Windows usually gets right). But then, IE on OS X has had numerous bugs from day one, including lack of support for long filenames (a problem shared with Microsoft Office v.X), occasional corruption of JPEG and other image files when saved to the local hard disk from the browser, and font rendering glitches (especially in Jaguar).
Where OS X shines is in applications that are written for the Cocoa framework, and in running Java applications. (Java applications run pretty quick under OS X, and look great to boot. Especially well written Swing apps.)
My one source of befuddlement: Load times and execution times for some "Classic" applications are even faster than the native versions of the same applications. (Well, assuming the Classic environment is already running.)
Read: games...
I am always waiting for it to copy files.
I use a Beige G3 overclocked to 300MHz. Even overclocked it is very slow. At the stock speed (233MHz) it is unusable. I use Jaguar with a nice 40GB 7200RPM IBM drive, and 512MB of RAM. Using the builtin ATI Rage Pro video with 6MB of VRAM, Aqua makes this system crawl. I use the machine as a web/mail/file server and for those tasks is is quite fast. In fact, I bet it would run faster if I could disable the graphics entirely.
To show exactly how bad it is, I can open a terminal, make it full screen, cd to a full directory, and ls -la it. CPU utilization jumps to 100% and stays there while the list slowly scrolls by. I even used the hack to disable font antialiasing, but that provides no speed up. For terminal usage, it is faster for me to use Putty on my Windows box. The same directory listing via SSH, it *much* faster. So obviously the graphics system is the bottleneck in my system.
The solution to this would be to buy a decent video card, but you can't stick any old PCI VGA card in a Mac. First off the card needs a Mac boot ROM, then it needs to be supported by OS X, and you also need drivers. Of course "Mac Edition" ATI cards cost more than their PC counterparts, and the Radeon 7000 is the only modern ATI card available in PCI form. This all adds up to real frustration for OS X users stuck with older non-AGP Macs.
Overall I would recommend using OS X on a Beige G3 only if you intend to use it as a light duty server. For workstation or home use, you really have to have a modern Mac (~500MHz and up) to enjoy the user experience.
I never wait for it to copy files.
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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It gets even worse when your off-screen drawing touches every pixel in your window. Apple encourages apps to do this, of course, by offering particularly gluttonous Aqua features like brushed-metal windows (Extreme has no way to ask the graphics hardware to chew on a full-window gradient, atop a texture, being rendered to an offscreen pixmap). Don't believe me? Fire up Quartz Debug (part of the developer tools; allows you to ask Quartz to highlight update rectangles before they're painted) and see for yourself.
I'm confident that Apple will continue to make improvements, but right now apps like iCal (which shouldn't be computationally intensive, but is all hopped up on Aqua) are miserably slow in screen updates.
Yeah, the GUI sure does seem slow on my Blue and White G3 350MHz 512MB RAM Radeon 7000, but that is not the point. Put Mac OS 7 on a Mac from 1997 and it will seem really fast. It's just that this G3 from 1998 (no matter how tricked out it is) won't run an OS from 2002 as fast as a computer from 2002 will. Although it does run an OS from 1998, even 1999 (Mac OS 9) really well.
Bottom line: Run the OS that the hardware was designed for. Or maybe one a year or two newer. But anything after that will run "slowly."
As raw tasks go, it's as fast as Mac OS 9. Encoding MP3's, playing games, etc.
Orange
I have an 800Mhz 512MB TiBook and 10.2 seems fast enough for my uses. Web, email, text editing, photo manipulation, and small compiles do fine.
I can switch back and forth between applications, unlike os9. I can also scan and do other things at the same time.
I have several Beige G3 machines that Apple says are "supported" by OS X.
HOWEVER, OS X includes only non-accelerated drivers for the graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, meaning that on a 366 MHz G3, simple things like resizing a window are damn near impossible not because of the operating system or CPU but because OS X uses opaque resizes and opaque window moves, which (as any old Unix or Linux user knows) are terribly painful with unaccelerated graphics hardware. Minimizing a window also seems to take a century.
If only Apple or ATI would simply write a driver for the ATI graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, OS X could be very usable on a whole generation of hardware where it is currently not very useful.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
OK, you know how your car feels faster right after you wash it? Well I tried changing my wallpaper and cleaning the Icons off the desktop... It feels like a new machine... at least twice as fast. 'cource my machine is a Sony, but since its all in your head anyway I image it will still work on a Mac.
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Dude, Chimera blows anything else out of the water for the platform it's written on.
I have a 500 MHz iBook and Chimera is about as responsive as the full Mozilla on an 800 MHz P3 in whatever OS you care to use.. And easily twice as fast loading and rendering as the full Mozilla on OSX.
XUL is slow. Hence, we have Phoenix, Galeon and Chimera.
I did have some problems with some pages, but that appears to be a problem with the Flash plug-in for OSX. Download the latest one from Macromedia and that problem goes away.
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
I bought my 867 G4 last year, December. I have ran OSX on this thing full time. I love it. I'm getting so used to OSX, that I don't think I could live without it. But here are my gripes: You ever run OS 9 on one of these newer G4s? WOW. I mean the computer feels like it's going faster than a crack addict's heart beat. Of course I am swiftly reminded that a crack addicts heart beat stops quite often, resulting in some sort of crash. iPhoto and iTunes are slow as shit. I have 40GB of Mp3s stored on a drive for iTunes, and it takes quite some time to load up. I wont even mention how it feels to run iPhoto with a couple thousand pictures. but hey, you can't do iPhoto on OS9, and iTunes would probably suck as much with a 40GB library. I have felt that OSX has grown with the new releases, just we're not all the way there yet. Dont get me wrong, I love it, etc., etc., but it's not exactly the fastest feeling OS. I attribute most of the problem to latency in opening menus and click responses. Speed that up and the OS feels 1000000000x faster. yeah.
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.
Perhaps we can agree to disagree!
I've got somewhat extensive experience using Windows XP, MacOS X, and Linux. These are my impressions based on a combination of subjective user experience and objective benchmark information I've found through research. I recommend that anyone seriously pondering this issue do their own research, particularly to back up the benchmark comments.
First, let's get my biases out in the open: I am a Macintosh user by (recent, OSX only) preference who's also perfectly comfortable assembling Linux or Windows PCs from bare motherboard and case right on up. I prefer UNIX-based operating systems for their stability and openness, the more stable and open the better, but find Windows inevitably the best practical choice for some situations.
I won't comment on disk and memory performance; others here have handled that ably, and I have no experience with MacOS X in very high load situations.
Processor Performance
This is the one that's subject to the most advocacy; raise your hands if you haven't heard the term "Megahertz Myth". Any hands up? Didn't think so. (Apple advocates aren't the only folks who like it; you'll hear it from AMD lovers, too.)
G3 and G4 processors run at far slower clock rates than P6-class processors. This much is objective. What Mac advocates like to claim is that G3 and G4 processors are much faster, clock for clock, than P6-class processors. The problem in evaluating this claim is that it's both false and true at the same time.
The G3 and G4 are not faster than P6-class processors at typical integer and floating point operations. They're just not. In fact, they tend to run (slightly) slower, clock for clock, in SPECmarks. They're only faster in one specialized world. The catch is, that specialized world is a major one.
Vector and matrix operations are useful in a ton of multimedia applications--most particularly image and video editing, but there are other applications as well. The G3 and G4 have much better vector units than P6-class processors. Not better, much better. This is why Apple always uses Photoshop as their benchmark: a G4 running well-optimized vector math is entirely capable of spanking a P6-class processor running at twice its clock speed or more.
So the answer to this question is that there is no definitive answer. Mac advocates will claim that graphical operations are the slowest things anyway, and so optimizing them will give you the most performance benefit overall. PC advocates will make the generalist argument, and include the (true) fact that an application must be hand-optimized for the G4's vector unit to see these performance gains.
Overall, most people think the G3 and G4 are slower for most purposes, and that the Mac won't have a serious chance at the top of the performance heap again until its next round of processor upgrades, coming next year.
UI Performance
This is the performance most people notice. I'll hit several areas of it, since there are tradeoffs.
First, the good. Aqua's overall responsiveness is probably the best of the three major windowing environments. Any of them can feel like they lose clicks or take forever to process them at times, but it generally feels like it happens less with Aqua than with either Windows or X. (Note that in X it's heavily dependent on what your desktop environment is--but most people like to use either KDE or GNOME, both of which have responsiveness issues.) Aqua also redraws on application switching faster than Windows does, and at about the same speed X does, since it handles open frames in much the same way.
Now, the bad, and it's significant. Aqua is the heaviest of the three major windowing systems; it has more and more complicated screen elements than either X or Windows. It is about as fast as Windows at drawing individual screen elements (both are faster than X under most driver configurations), but overall, it feels the slowest of any of them at general UI drawing tasks. There are also some operations--like scrolling or resizing complex frames--that are just embarassingly slow.
Overall, I like Aqua for its stability and prettiness (fonts look better on Aqua than any other UI, period), but I can see why its overhead irritates many people, especially those who've heavily customized and optimized an X setup.
That's my $0.02. Hope it helps.
Mac OS X isn't actually slow but has a lot of technologies that have got a bad rap (though they didn't always deserve them).
Mac OS X is based on a Microkernel - now everyone agrees these are slow, right? Well, sure I can see where that's coming from - but Apple have gone to great lengths to make this as fast as possible without losing the benefits. So the Kernel isn't actually slow, it compares well with other BSDs and Linux.
The Mac is only 800MHz(ish) for low end machines so it must be slow? This is the classic "MHz Myth" the G4 has a short pipeline (a good thing) and executes over 90% of it's instructions in 1 cycle or less (the modern definition of RISC, TRIVIA: the old definition was implements less the 100 instructions). And then there's the amazing AltiVec (which Apple call the "Velocity Engine", if you see these terms they refer to the same thing). Macs have blistering real math performance (the G3 iBook doesn't have the AltiVec).
Macs are based on Objective-C - that's REALLY slow. Well sure if you just implemented Objective-C without optimisations then it would be slow, but NeXT (them that did the Objective-C implementation) didn't do that. They added a method lookup cache which speeds things up a great deal, and IMPs that can be used in tight loops to gain extra zip (healh warning, IMPs are not ususally needed and can cause stunning bugs if you're not careful with them - unless you have a large tight loop that REALLY needs speeding up - don't bother with IMPs). The use of allocation zones can also speed up the VM system a great deal (these aren't as troublesome as IMPs can be, but again aren't as often needed as you might think). The Kits make heavy use of these tricks so they are pretty fast.
Quartz has lots of tricks to make it fast, and now all current Macs can make use of Quartz Extreem (uses the compositor on the GPU to dramatically speed up the whole windowing system).
So no Macs aren't slow. Apple's site includes server stats and they are very impressive too.
But the implementation details aren't widely understood so a lot of people's initial reaction is "Oh that's gotta be slow" - it really isn't.
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.
Whoever first mentions photoshop filters in a Mac performance discussion ends the conversation and concedes.
It's plenty fast, but not as fast as I wanted. So I sped it up. Here's what I did for my machine; some of it is what I routinely do to other people's machines. ymmv. ymmm. yumm.
/System/Library/StartupItems. Say Goodbye crashreporter, appletalk, and rendezvous. I was nice and had my modifications listen to /etc/hostconfig, in case I wanted to re-enable them quickly, at a later date. Most other people need networking, I've noticed, but I just need scp and ftp. ;P
First, I advise all 10.1.x users to upgrade. Then again, I work for a school, and teachers can get 10.2 for free. It's worth it. I don't care that it should be free. If you want better performance, stop griping, or run OS9. OS10.0 and 10.1 are not optimal for ordinary use.
make sure you're following the recommendation for Video RAM -- 16MB, Quartz Extreme pretty much needs it. If you can't upgrade a card, cram as much memory as you can in there, you will need it.
I wouldn't attempt to use a OSX machine with less than 256. All power users get 512MB by default.
There's an option on the installation disk (under the disk utility option, maybe?) that will reset permissions on the OS. I've noticed this would speed up a slower computer; it takes about 1/2 hour on my laptop.
Turn the machine off once in a while. I suspect OSX's memory garbage collection isn't as good as it could be. I reboot the laptop about once a month, (after I've had a finder crash, usually).
if you've got a laptop that isn't on at 3 in the morning, run the periodic files (i.e., let cron do its thing). Someone released an app that does this for the shell-feary; I forget its name. Google loves you.
Use a valid hostname. Something called "Foo's Computer" isn't valid DNS, even though it's the default (bad apple!). This will affect how long it takes to connect to the network, esp. at boot time. Having DNS entries (and reverse DNS) helps a bunch, if you're using DHCP (there are opts in bind to autofill this for you). Valid hostnames include a-z, 0-9, and "-". Have fun and be creative.
Disable what you don't need. I edited the scripts in
prebinding question. Run as root (use sudo, or, um, use root)
update_prebinding -root / -force
And wait for a bit, watching a bunch of errors spring up because the printer apps weren't prebound. You might want to do an output redirection (add something like 2&>1 ~/prebind.log to the command [or is it 2>&1?]) if you want a record of what it did.
here to help,
mike
Manual prebinding is no longer needed in 10.2. The first time a non-prebound app is launched, the OS will quietly prebind it behing the scenes, so the second launch will be at full speed.
Of course, many installers will still do it on install. This is kind of irritating if you have to do a lot of installs at once, like update a stock install with all the updates.
My video compression blog
The slowest part is probably the GUI and 2D graphics. If you need high performance, you can fall back on the gaming and OpenGL APIs.
I have been a Mac fan for a long time. But I left the Mac fold in 1999 when I dumped my 7500 as my own personal machine. Mac OS X lured me back into buying a Mac again last year(an iBook). I have to say it is a nice OS, but very very slow. It has the reliability, and features. It does not integrate an X11 server which I find to be a big short coming. There are open source projects that can add this ability, but still not ready for prime time last time I checked. With Max OS X I get the spinning rainbow beach ball more times than I care to count.
I am at the point I prefer Linux for my OS of choice now. I may not get the seamless integration of the software, and the new hardware toys, but I can live with it. I am totally annoyed by the slow performance of OS X. Maybe if I had the newest, latest, greatest hardware that slowness wouldn't be a factor. I won't be spending any more money on Mac hardware. If Apple decides to go Intel and I can buy the OS for my PC I will try it again with the faster equipment, but as of right now I am done with it. The ibook is about to go to my kids for school.
For the last year I've been using a Powerbook 550 MHz with 768 MB of RAM and the latest incarnation of OS X (currently 10.2.1). Prior to that I have used Linux on my primary desktop OS for six years.
Truthfully, the Mac OS X GUI feels slightly slower than what would be expected under Linux or OS 9. A great (and somewhat undermentioned) example is the response time it takes to show a menu once it has been clicked on. Under OS 9, the response time was very close to nothing -- you click on "File", and immediately see what is under it. Quickly dragging back and forth across "Edit", "Window" and other menus presents a blur of menu options that pop up and disappear just as quickly as you moved over them. In OS X however, the result is somewhat less awe-inspiring; menus do show up, but there is a slightly uncomfortable lag between when the menu is selected and when it actually shows up.
Sending the system to sleep is slower in newer versions of OS X than in older versions. Under 10.1, the system slept immediately when I clicked on "Sleep". Under 10.2, there is a consistent ten second lag before it actually sleeps. I never used to put Linux machines to sleep (that sounds funny), so it is hard to compare the difference.
One reason why things are slower than other operating systems is that there is a higher overhead in displaying screen objects. Each window not only has a drop shadow attached, it can be made translucent to any arbitrary amount. I routinely run my terminals at 70-80% translucency to see through to ones underneath for quick number fetching, etc.. This, just like running transparent Eterms on Linux, incurs higher overhead.
Another problem with system responsiveness seems to be related to the age of the user account. If you have been using the same user account for a long time (and have lots of application settings, cache files, temporary files, data files under your home directory, etc.), the overall system performance seems a lot slower than a new user. Switching to "root" for instance, reveals an incredibly fast interface, as if nothing were installed on the system. I am sure there are "Spring Cleaning" types of applications out there, but I haven't looked into them yet.
What I would suggest if you are interested in purchasing an Apple, but are concerned with the system responsiveness, is to visit an Apple store or a local CompUSA or Fry's and try out the system you are interested in purchasing. Load up a million terminal screens, play MP3s in the background, do whatever you intend on doing with it when it's yours. This obviously won't reveal long-term responsiveness trends, but it will give an idea as to what sort of performance you would see.
I can attest from personal experience that the usability and durability of a system is more important than just the speed. My Powerbook may not run perl scripts as fast as my Linux box, but it has a certain charm that makes it all OK. It's kind of like what Doc Brown said in Back to the Future when building a time machine: "If you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?" The Delorean may not be a Formula 1 race car, but it still gets the job done very nicely.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
- It's my web browser (Chimera and/or Explorer)
- It's my web server, (Apache/PHP).
- It's my webcam.
- Running Photoshop.
- Running Reason
- Running LimeWire
The ONLY time i have ever experienced ANY lag is when a transparent window tries to "Genie" into the Dock. Other than that, it occationally locks up in Explorer with the rainbow CD cursor, which can be fixed by clicking on another running application, the Dock or desktop space (i.e. Finder) included. I also run the same OS on my mother's 350Mhz G4 box, with nearly the same performance.It's not such a heavy load, but then again, think about these same activities on a 400Mhz Wintel machine. Ouch.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Actually Phoenix uses XUL too. The XUL UI for Mozilla is just badly written.
DNA just wants to be free...
Apple doesn't care very much about European customers....(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
That's a brilliant assesment. In fact, Apple probably doesn't care about any of their non-US customers, which is why prices are so unbelievably high. Except in places like Japan, where the prices are nearly identical to those in the States.
Hit www.apple.co.jp and you'll see that a fully loaded iBook costs 231,100 yen. Convert that and you get US$1,897.
A fully loaded iBook from www.apple.com costs US$1,849.
Furthermore, you walk through Shinjuku or Omotesando, and you'll see more shiny Apples than you know what to do with. I've found brand new Macs in South America, too. Even had a repair job on a new powerbook and sat in on an Apple sponsored multimedia conference in Santiago, Chile.
So before you go spouting off about how Apple dicks over their European cutomers, you might want to reconsider. You might want to think about why it is you Europeans love paying all those taxes--all that free healthcare and higher education has got to get paid for somehow. Take a look at those 20% luxury taxes on things like electronics you guys are paying.
When I want socialized medicine, I'm moving to Europe. When you want cheap toys, you might consider a trip to the States.
My other computer is your Windows box
There's other speed issues, too, which I believe are probably tied in to all the extra crap Apple makes to go through to, for instance, minimize a window, or pull up a dialog box. If OSX would just *do* what I want it to do, rather than animating everything possible, it might feel a lot faster. (We've turned off all of the animations you can turn off from the control panels; there may be "hidden" tweaks.)
Personally, I thought it was all right, but perhaps my experience running M[whatever] release Mozillas and KDE2, etc, has made me a bit more accepting. The actual applications ran all right, and having the command line was a dream. My GF absolutely loathed the speed, though. She refuses to have anything to do with it, and compared with OS9 for doing basic tasks, it's easy to see her point.
I'm not sure what kind of graphics card is in there (I've never much paid attention to Mac hardware until OSX came along, because I've thought that the OS was horrendous), so it might not be using their Quartz Extreme (or whatever) technology, which evidentally GL-accelerates all the window management, etc. That would certainly speed things up a bit. Also, I'm fairly sure it's one of the lower-end blue G3s, so a faster machine would probably do better with it.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
> XUL is slow. Hence, we have Phoenix, Galeon and Chimera.
Actually Phoenix is written with XUL and it's lighnting fast so i would just say that full moz is bloatware (as it is intended) but not that XUL is slow.
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."
If, in OS 9, you have a dialog box open and need to check a file name in a window behind it, you have to cancel out of the box. In os X or classic, you can just click on the window you want.
Now we have a scheme where your normally-dormant hotshot GPU is helping out with drawing the OS.
Haven't Linux and Windows used acclerated hardware video drivers for drawing their GUI for many years? I'm talking about Windows 95 era, possibly even WFWG 3.11. I'm sorry if it only takes a $30 "hotshot" graphics card to accelerate the rendering of a perfectly usable 2-D GUI in X or Win32, but them's the breaks.
I expect Microsoft to go through similar growing pains when they go for the photorealistic desktop in Longhorn.
Growing pains? Okay, but be careful what you label growth or progress. Are 3D or photo realistic GUIs easier, more reliable, or more productive? I think they might be more attractive and way cool, but is that really net "growth" considering the immense R&D and consumer expense to get it?
Well, I guess I'm a typical Mac user. I have a shiny new iMac and absolutely no idea how many giga-somethings-or-other are in there. I've always felt that comparing computer speeds is like comparing penis sizes. Winning the contest doesn't necessarily mean you get the girl you want. In short: Speed is not why I bought a Mac. It's a nice, friendly computer that does everything I want it to do without driving me nuts as Windows used to. What do I care if some other OS is a tad bit faster?
Thing 3: 512 MB RAM costs $50 bucks, affordable even to white, three child, 68 volkswagon-driving people.
The box belongs to a non-profit school who cant afford to pay their employees. 50 bucks is a lot of money.
asshole.
ps: you are racist smart guy.
I bought a Mac out of quasi-necessity; I am a musician and I have been using Emagic Logic Audio for a number of years. Apple recently bought Emagic, and naturally, PC support went out the window (no pun intended).
I also have two other systems at home; a dual PIII 800 and a dual Athlon 1.2 GHz. I wrote a quick PHP script to measure the execution time on a loop that calculates primes between two fixed numbers, and I ran it on the Mac, my Linux server, and my Linux workstation.
Here's the results (average of three runs):
Perhaps it's just that PHP isn't as fast on an OS X box, but I basically used untuned, default installs on all three machines. The numbers were the same on the Linux boxen with or without X running.
For me, the Mac feels slower, and to me, my quick and dirty benchmark only confirms what I feel.
FWIW, Here's the code:
<?php
function timenow() {
list($microsec, $sec) = explode(" ",microtime());
return ($microsec + $sec);
}
$count = 0; //arbitrary starting point //arbitrary ending point
echo "Calculating...\n\n";
$loopstart = 6000;
$loopend = 7000;
$start = timenow();
if ($notprime == false) $count++;for ($x = $loopstart; $x <= $loopend; $x++) {
$notprime = false;
}
$end = timenow(); ." seconds to calculate\n";
echo "There are $count primes between $loopstart and $loopend\n";
echo "This took ". ($end - $start)
?>
I use a Dell Inspiron laptop (1.8GHz, 512MB RAM) with XP the whole day at work and I use a friends TiPB 800MHz with OSX 10.2 on occaision (I have an old 333MHz G3 PB at home with OSX 10.1.5).
:)
XP is very stable compared to previous MS OS's. I haven't had the OS crash on me once yet. But the UI is also considerably slower than Win2000 and more confusing. Much more confusing. And that, for me, is the major point about OSX. The UI is extremely pleasing to work with over long periods of time. It's smooth and very good looking. The large buttons and type don't hurt my eyes after sitting in front of the machine for 8 hours at a time. The simplicity and clean design of OSX make it easy to hit those buttons without having to pause and concentrate on hitting the correct link unlike in XP where i suffer a considerable amount of arm, neck and hand strain after long hours in front of it. The plain, simple idea of having *all* control panels in one place *without* the Windows mess of myriad unrelated dialog boxes makes it easier to change settings, without first having to find the settings. All programmes have the preferences option in the same place, which is another plus compared to windows. And if I need the detail, power and complexity of Unix the Terminal is a click on the dock away. The Console in WinXP has improved in usability and power (Tab completion, file dragging for paths, output redirection etc) but is still not close to a Unix shell.
As for Applications, Photoshop and illustrator are more sluggish than in XP, except for redraw operations on large bitmaps where Altivec really shines, and I for one tend to work methodically in those programmes and appreciate a programme that doesn't run away from me.
If I had the money right now, I would go and buy a TiPB with OSX immediately and only use the Dell for Windows tasks.
My name is Theo Stauffer. I'm a Sys Admin for a small company and I would switch back to the Mac immediately if I had the cash
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
My G4 is:
400Mhz
512MB
2 20GB Fujitsu HDs
DVD
AGP
10.2.1
Everything is plenty fast. In fact most things are faster than the Wintel 850. Especially Mathy things.
Every now and then a program will get _slow_ . I just restart that app and all is good.
I would say on my pending TiBook OS X should rock even harder.
This
I've been using OS X for quite some time now on an iBook (G3 700/128 RAM), a TiBook (G4 500/256 RAM) and a G4 tower (867 DP/768 RAM), and the experience is different on each. On the tower, Jaguar screams; speed is just not an issue. And I install lots of extra stuff. On the TiBook things aren't quite as fast but still I don't find speed a problem. On the iBook I sometimes slow to a crawl as I listen to the computer access the hard drive back and forth for swap space. So I think RAM is the culprit. The clock speed of the iBook is faster than the TiBook yet it runs slower because there just isn't enough RAM (especially if I run more than a couple of applications). OS X is RAM-intensive (especially pre-Jaguar; if you have OS X 10.1.5 on an older Mac you should really upgrade for a noticeable speed improvement). Now I just need to get some RAM for the iBook since it's the computer I use most of the time....
One thing about NeXTStep and OSX was is was developed to be around for a long time. Design decisions were made based on what was best for the long term life of the product, not on the day's median technology. The thought always was that hardware will catch up. OSX is very snappy on most contemporary Mac hardware.
"not the dual 1.25GHz machines that sell for $4500+."
This is really specious--you'd have to tweak and add crap to a system to hell and back to get that mac at that price point. Go to their store, check online--that is just silly.
I've been drooling over an OSX Mac for a while, but I earn my money writing software for Windows. That being said, is OSX now fast enought to reasonable host Virtual PC and Visual Studio.net? I'd be willing to spring for a top of the line Powerbook or G4, but I'd need the environment to run at (hopefully) something like 80% of what I get on my P4 2Ghz machine.
Note: I currently have a Toshiba laptop and a Dell Desktop, and they both rock as development platforms. However, getting a Mac (especially a laptop) would be really fun and let me start experimenting with developing for the Mac GUI (I've already got a fair amount of linux/unix systems programming experience, so that would be a nice starting place on the mac).
Anyone doing this?
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
He said "hassle" as in "more inconvenient" which does not mean "slower" which implies that he didn't know about Command-Tab. I'm assuing he meant that he had to move the mouse to click on a window of the application to bring it front-most.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Correction: It is Mac OS X that is based on Objective-C. Linux/PPC systems are (all kernel, all Xfree86 and most of server applications) written on C.
And Gentoo/PPC on G3 powerbooks (without AltiVec) makes a way better (faster) optimization results than Mac OS X.
So no Macs aren't slow
Especially when Linux/PPC (namely Gentoo) is the OS installed on that Mac :)
Less is more !
I'm a hardened Mac OS user, have been a graphic designer for the last ten years. I love Mac OS 8.6 and 9.2. Everything works just fine. OS X is definitely fast enough in terms of the applications working away, doing calculations - but the damned GUI is slow. And depressingly it's the animations, the sliding drawers, sheets - the icing which has been added - which really slows me down. Why can't us "professional" users have a simpler GUI which doesn't feature time-wasting animations?
While my snappy answers to stupid questions usually end here, I feel I should elaborate, lest I be called a troll or worse a (gasp) Linux user.
I feel I have sufficent knowledge to answer this question in the affirmative based on my following experiences:
So is Mac OS X slow? In my experience, yes. Does that matter to me? No, as it's not my platform of choice (see my signature) and it's not free anyway. I just use it as a tool in my professional life and to develop my software so that will have a wider audience.
Nathan's blog
Speed may depend on how the application was compiled. I've been developing some software on my iBook, and have found -O3 optimizations to produce code that is 6 to 7 times faster than the unoptimized counterparts.
The middle mind speaks!
...and I wound up running Photoshop 5 inside of Classic.
I've stuck with 5 since 5.5 came out- every release after changes more things that I liked into things I can't use to do my job- so I wasn't enthused about 7. I gave it a spin anyway.... and went right back to 5 in Classic after 7 stole focus too many times.
5 is a bit spastic running under Jaguar, but it does two things 7 can't- window shade and stay in the background.
The only problem I have with the operating system UI is the lack of window shading.
I have NO END of issues with the present state of OS X third party applications- particularly the Adobe suite, which has decided to completely ignore the full Aqua common command structure, and the windowing behaviour in Macromedia apps.
Final conclusion: OS X is great. OS X apps suck something fierce (unless we're talking video, in which case it's an AMAZING improvement....).
This is why I use X at work and 9 on my powerbook, which I don't do any video editing on anyway.
That's bloaty mozilla works way slower on both Mac OS X and Windows for me comparing to both Linux/x86 and Linux/PPC.
I think the problem is in swapping: both Windows NT and Mac OS X have very bad (slow) implementation of swapping. For example, it is not a bad idea that Linux uses a separate swap partiion.
Besides swapping, don't forget the speed of Ext3 (in some journalling modes) comparing to both NTFS and HPFS.
Less is more !
I have four computers on my home LAN. The Windows 2000 boxes are a Pentium 2 233 with 96MB RAM and a Pentium 3 600 with 384MB RAM. The two Macs are an iBook 600 with 384MB RAM and a PowerMac G3 450 with 512MB RAM.
In my opinion, both of my Macs are faster than the Windows boxes. I run only OS X. I don't even have Classic installed. Both platforms have the occasional hiccup where I'm waiting on the computer to do something. However, I get this more frequently on the Windows boxes than I do on the Macs. It's usually Explorer that I have to wait on in Windows -- including the Start Menu. On the Mac, it's probably manual window resizing most of the time. I rarely do this though, I generally use the zoom widget which is far superior to Window's maximize widget. Window dragging on the Mac is also faster than on Windows. Well, I guess they're both really the same speed, but Windows takes a while to refresh the screen where the window was and on the Macs that is not a problem.
None of my Macs are new enough to support Quartz Extreme -- my newest Mac was built in 1999. I'd see better performance on the new iBooks due simply to the fact that they have better video cards.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
... on a lot of things. Most significantly, available memory (512M & up recommended) and how much of the video processing can be offloaded onto the graphics chip. If you're thinking about one of the LCD iMacs, you're probably OK, although I'd opt for the top-end configuration due to the 32M VRAM vs 16M in lesser configurations.
In my own usage, I'm running OS X 10.2 on a couple of machines: a 384M Powerbook sporting a 500 MHz G4 (a 67 MHz system bus and 8M of VRAM with an ATI 128 LT-Pro graphics chip are the weak knees in this system), and an ancient 7500 (almost 50 MHz system bus, 512M RAM, a 466 MHz G3 card and an ATI VR128 graphics card, which partially supports Quartz).
Clearly, these are marginal machines -- both officially unsupported for OS X (the Powerbook due to the G4 3rd-party upgrade, and the 7500 because, well, just because). Performance is acceptable, but obviously not what you'd call snappy. But definitely not sluggish. The 7500 runs apache, QuickTime Streaming Server (for streamed video/mp3s), does ipforwarding for other machines on the network, concurrently with a logged-on user surfing the web, with the only casualty being pretty slow network performance for the ipforwarded machines -- but then the ethernet port on the 7500 only supports half duplex operation.
OS X goes overboard (IMHO) with the GUI, from rampant transparency to gratuitous animation. At least you can turn off the animation, and I've tried getting rid of the blended layers, but the performance increase was insufficient (but noticable) to justify dorking up the system that much. But the fact that it is doing SO much with the classy presentation means it will always come in second for any kind of graphics -- at least until the graphics processors are able to take over nearly all of the heavy lifting, which they're getting a lot closer to doing. I wouldn't think of attempting OS X gaming on anything but the latest & greatest hardware.
And one should keep in mind that it IS only a bit over a year old. I'd consider it to be late beta quality code at this point, and if they would focus on polishing it and tightening up the code, it would be nice -- but they keep tweaking the architecture. With 10.2.2, the rumor is they're going to toss in a journalled file system, so don't expect lightning disk I/O for a while.
Lastly, it depends upon what you do with it. Virtual PC operation is abysmally slow under OS X as compared to OS 9, but anything done through the terminal window is plenty quick. Web browsing, document manipulation, and most user-oriented tasks work quite well. Being a Mac, photo and video editing are predictably superior to any other platform, and with OS X you can have a boatload of tasks running in the background as well. As a developer platform, it's a fantastic machine.
I bought one of the 500MHz iBooks shortly before the 600Mhz iBooks were released (D'oh!), and it was a bit slow until I stuffed an extra 512M into it. Since then, I've been using it for development work, lots of compiles, lots of testing, and it is just great. My G4 tower is faster, but I do not find myself wishing the iBook was faster when I'm on the road (which is a *lot*, unfortunately - what I find myself wanting is more pixels. :')
I've looked at SkipStone before. Muhri's a hard guy to get in touch with (I haven't seen any activity on his site since August). Galeon has several active developers. Not to knock SkipStone at all (it's a cool lightweight browser), it's just tough when its only author/maintainer is a grad student.... ;)
moto411.com
NO, it's the Pre-AltiVec G3 chip that makes his system sub-optimal, it's not only a lesser chip, but the loss of the AltiVec engine severly inhibits the raw number crunching capability of the processor. OS X supports the iBook G3, but it was certainly not designed for it.
--- What
The one time I do notice a lack of zippiness on a Mac is when I thrash the cache. Unfortunely, OSX seems to have a unified buffer+page cache, which means that I/O and virtual memory compete with each other head to head for physical memory. So if you have an app that runs through a gigabyte file, all the programs that weren't running at that time wind up swapped out, and it takes a while to get them back.
This is something Apple could probably fix with some intelligent tuning - it's exactly the same problem Sun had in the early versions of SunOS 4. I do hope they fix it soon - it's a bit of a drag.
MacOS X file manager is terribly slow. Try resizing the window. On a 733MHz G4 w/512MB RAM and a GF3 TI 500, you could see the machine struggle to keep up with screen redraws as the window changes. Come to think of it, it feels a lot like Windows XP! Of course, don't take my word for it, I'm very much a minimalist and expect things to be responsive. I take great joy in eliminating the hundreds of items from a normal user's Windows "startup" folder, as well as deleting everything from the "run" registry key...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Mac OS X is based on a Microkernel - now everyone agrees these are slow, right? Well, sure I can see where that's coming from - but Apple have gone to great lengths to make this as fast as possible without losing the benefits.
;-)
Then why does Apple use Mach at its core, and not a second generation MK like L4?
The answer is easily guessed: because NeXT used it back when there was no second MK generation at all, and MacOS X is a rewrite of NeXT (proven a.o. by the screenshots of the MacOS X Server betas).
When rewriting, it's a lot of easier to just change the important stuff (UI GOODIES!!!) and leave the unimportant stuff (kernel) as unchanged as possible.
They may have been speed-hacking Mach allright, but they didn't throw it away entirely just because too many software depends on its APIs.
That's my guess. But I guess I'm right
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Macs are based on Objective-C - that's REALLY slow.
Correction: It is Mac OS X that is based on Objective-C. Linux/PPC systems are (all kernel, all Xfree86 and most of server applications) written on C.
Correction for the correction. The operating system is written in C/C++. The Mac OS X Cocoa Framework is written for Objective-C (and can implement Objective-C++ and Java).
I'm using OS X for half a year now, after having used previous Mac OS's for nearly 15 years. Having said that, I think I can comment a bit about these "sluggishness problems".
:-) The old way in OS 9 was more responsive because it just displayed an outline when you dragged your mouse. As soon as you let it go, the resize was performed once. Even if this took a second, nobody would mind because during the time when the user wanted feedback ("how much will my window cover") the outline was instantaneous. The OS X way certainly looks nicer, but when you wait a second until the window is updated *while dragging with the mouse*, it doesn't feel responsive at all.
Mac OS X is definitely less responsive that OS9 in some respects, but they can be (and will most likely will be) fixed in a future version. Here are some ideas:
- Bringing up a printer dialog on Chimera 0.6 (G4/400) takes roughly 10 seconds. During this time, the OS calculates what it should display, inluding looking for printers, before it shows the dialog. When it is done thinking about it, it finally displays the dialog. During the waiting, you can use other apps, you can sometimes even use other windows of the same app, but you can't interact with your current window. A possible improvement would be to just show the dialog so that the user has control over it again - even though it has not yet finished thinking about it. If there are elements that still need some calculation, show the element greyed out and display a "still calculating on this element" pic besides it
- Preview (the app that displays PDFs and pictures). When you press the down arrow for the next page, it take the app up to 5 seconds to display the next page. During this waiting time, there is no visual indication that the program has aknowledged your command, neither that it is actually busy, nor how long it will take this time. This can of course be easily changed by informing the user
- Finder: Bringing up an info dialog by pressing Cmd-I makes you wait for 2-3 seconds while the info dialog is internally built, then displayed at once. Again, this could be displayed immediately with some infos missing, after which the missing info is calculated and added.
- Resizing (my favorite
Well, that's about it.
Thats very true. And yeah, thats the response I use, force quit. And yeah, it sure is nice it doesnt take down the whole box like good ol classic.
Trouble is, this happens all too often.
I have a client who got a TiBook, fresh from Apple. Brand new, middle grade, 768mb ram, Jag, yada yada.
He calls me up like a week later and says:
"So how come I am spending all this time watching this beach ball spin?"
"Well what are you doing?"
"I have Office open, IE and and Enoutrage, just trying to work, I mean I have tons of memory right?"
"Yeah you do.."
Point is, this box was fresh from Apple. I taught him how to force quit. Point being, why should you have to do it all the time?
I thought it "just works"?
Must be the same Apple lies like the one in the switch campaign that says you cant do digital audio or video on a PC.
yeah OK..
Either you are extremely simple-minded, or have absolutely no trolling ability.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Actually, the kernel is slow. In lmbench (which measures the speed of basic UNIX kernel operations) OS X is half the speed of Linux. And the Velocity engine would be great...if the G4 had enough front side bus bandwidth to actually feed it. The AltiVec units themselves are very high quality, but because the average P4 has 3x the memory bandwidth (and streaming SIMD operations are *very* memory bandwidth dependent) it can't shine in the current G4.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
When rewriting, it's a lot of easier to just change the important stuff (UI GOODIES!!!) and leave the unimportant stuff (kernel) as unchanged as possible.
>>>>>>>>>
That's the real reason *real* NIX grognards will never use OS X. To them, the kernel is important, and the UI isn't. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I still don't like the proselytizing attitude Mac-heads have gotten lately.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
They wanted to know if MacOS seemed slow to the users on mid-range macs. Not if it would be 'theoretically fast' based on the technology.
Basically what they really need to know is 'interface latency'. How long between when you click and when something happens. Things like Vector engines are not going to help this.
While the P4/Athlon and (I assume) G4 can all run more then one instruction at once (not just one) that's irrelevant, what is being asked here is if the OS is slow for the hardware it's running on. Win95 would be blazing fast on a p3-500 with 128 megs of ram, but XP would run like a hog on the same machine.
Since I seriously doubt anyone has any kind of actual measurements this is basically going to be nothing more then a page-view generating flamewar on slashdot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I originally ran OS X on my Beige G3 (300 Mhz, 128 Meg RAM) and it was DOG slow.
I have since upgraded to a 450 MHz G4 CPU, and that pepped things up a bit - but the REAL kicker was going up to 256 Meg of RAM. You need AT LEAST 256 megs of RAM to run OS X reasonably fast.
The effect was so dramatic, I kicked up the RAM to 640 Meg.
Performance is adequate, and if it weren't for the fact that the Beige G3 platform itself wasn't obsoleted by OS X (crappy ADB and SCSI support, no support for Quartz Extreme), I wouldn't even be considering replacing it. But this machine will still be serving me for many years to come.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Never! It's all that and a bag of potato chips.
Actually, k-meleon 0.7 hasn't been released yet. The webpage was announced a week ago, but the betas have been available for about six months through the development mailing list.
I've got a 500Mhz TiBook, 1Gb RAM. The interface, at times, is a bit slow. TheGUI seems to have to go through an ounce or two of weed (smokingly fast! ...NOT) to deal with disk I/O. That spinning rainbow CD icon pops up every now and then, and while it's certainly not unbearable, it is annoying and I've never experienced anything like it on Win2K.
A specific benchmark example of speed: Using FileMaker Pro 6.0v3 (which is amazingly crappy on OSX despite FMI being an Apple subsidiary), I'm testing the migration to a new build of databases. Note that in OS9, you have to manually allocate the max amount of memory FMP can use (40Mb); it doesn't use any more in OSX (I did say it's a POS already, didn't I?), but at least it doesn't need manually tweaked.
OS9.2.1 on a 500Mhz G3 iMac with 256Mb or Ram, it takes 45 minutes to clear test import data from the database set and close the application (it has to remove unused blocks). Then on a fresh import run, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data into the database set.
OSX 10.2.1 on my 500Mhz G4 TiBook with 1Gb RAM, it takes about 1 minute (vs 45 minutes) to clear data from the database set and quit the application. Then, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data back into the database set.
But...
The core OS seems really fucking fast, and amazinly functional, to me. I run Apache/PHP/MySQL on my TiBook, and can copy files off our Linux server and they *just work* on my TiBook. I can take our entire corporate web environment mobile in a matter of minutes. I switch between single and dual monitor mode all the time, and there's never a problem. I end up changing between 3-4 network configurations all the time, and it *just works*. I've set my laptop up, wireless and running off battery, in my kid's room running a DVD, and I can go to our other computer (an old 604e Mac), mount the laptop's volume, and do web development work, hitting the Apache/PHP/MySQL environment on the laptop, while the thing plays a DVD flawlessly. And it's not like the thing chokes trying to serve files via HTTP *and* handle BBEdit chewing on the files over the network at the same time.
I've been running 10.2.1 since the beginning of October; the system has not crashed or needed rebooting - not even once - except for when application or update installs require it. I've never seen *any* other laptop handle all this - Windows or OS9 - without the need for constant reboots and/or system crashes.
So, blah blah blah, YES, OSX is SLIGHLTLY SLOWER. Enough that I can notice it. But it is *so* much more stable, and more functional than anything else out there, windows or OS9, that I'll take the trade-off.
Oh, and I'll be getting myself one of those new 1Ghz TiBooks with the SuperDrive pretty soon! Now I won't have to copy the cheezy little movies I create to a co-worker's flat-panel iMac to burn DVD's.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
That's just plain silly.
:-)
:-)
:-) But that's neither OS 9's fault, though.
I have OS 9.1 on a 250 MHz Powermac 6500 with 128 Mb RAM, and it just loads and runs, not "crawls".
DOH! It's just a little program!
How do you expect something that fits on a 150 MB (and that's including Microsnot Internet Exploder and other goodies!) SCSI disk to be slow, especially when it only lacks 22 Mb to stuff the *entire* OS disk on the RAM in the first place?
Like the AmigaOS, that fitted easily on a 8 MB partition, MacOS 9.1 still feels like a very small system shell in many ways not unlike GEOS/C64 (OK THAT was slow), or DOS on steroids: fast -- and easy to program around. Which is proven by the fact that MacOS 9.1 is only used to boot my Mac into Linux 90% of the time
It sometimes seems OSes become huge and nonunderstandable at the very same point they introduce memory protection for them. (I believe that even counts for Win 3.1 -> 95?)
Anyway, jumping right into kernel memory has always been much more fun than this stupid system call trapping!
Back to topic: yes, my Mac takes ages to boot up. That's because it waits for network disks that are never available. That's my fault, I should remove that one of these days. If you have a problem like that, that's not my fault
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I could easily become addicted to tabbed browsing. I usually open links in a new tab, and switch back to the original while waiting a page load (very nice, especially when a site is being cruched under the load of a good Slashdotting).
It'd be perfect if someone would tell me the keyboard shortcut for switching between tabs... Please tell me that such a shortcut exists...
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
I can even watch a normal-sized (~320x240) DivX movie full-screen with very few dropped frames.
>>>>>>>>>>>.
On a 500 MHz G3! I could play full screen DivXs on my P2-300 while playing a couple of MP3s in the background! And that was on Windows! Don't even get me started on BeOS!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
My wife's ibook 700 was pretty unbearably slow with OS X 10.2 . Blowing an extra $125 on 512MB of RAM fixed it real quick, though. It's a shame they come with 128MB standard, that really isn't enough.
Last login: Thu Nov 7 10:36:03 from 130.199.52.23
Welcome to Darwin!
[ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied% uptime
8:15PM up 5 days, 5:48, 2 users, load averages: 0.27, 0.31, 0.31
[ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied%
point being, you should just put the sucker to sleep at night...it wakes up and is ready to go in ~10 seconds. do you ever switch off your linux box? then why the osX box?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
We're at a very interesting time in OSs now. While Windows is still getting slower everyday (XP killed all the nice things that started with Win2K) the other two big OSs, Linux and OS X are getting faster everyday. KDE 3.x is faster than KDE 2.x to the point where it's even usable for me, and it has tons more features. OS X 10.2 has a lot more features than OS X 10.0, but is a lot faster. The only time I've ever seen this before was with BeOS. And honestly, it makes sense. Adding new features, generally, needn't have any effect on performance other than on memory usage. Adding a better file search, for example, shouldn't effect how long it takes to display my emails, not if the program is well designed. Hopefully, this trend continues. Hopefully, KDE 4.x on my 2GHz, 640MB P4 will finally match BeOS 4.5 on my 300 MHz 64MB P2...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I recently got fed up with my windoze box crashes and got a PowerMac G4 733 with OS X 10.2. The switchover was much easier than I expected, but the thing is dog slow. It has 640M memory, but I added another 512M. That helped, but even then it still was a lot slower than my windoze box. Granted, it's a 1.8Ghz system, but that's the point: you can argue about exact equivalencies, but you double the clock rate and it's going to be a lot faster. Period.
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.
OK, since the original post was asking us Apple users about operations that seem faster/slower than on other systems here are my 2cents.
I'm running 10.2.1 on an old, creaky original 233Mhz G3 and it suits my needs just fine. I had a much faster G3 once, but that belonged to the company I was working for before the crash.
As a web designer by profession, Macs seem to run all the "required" software as fast or faster than the Wintel boxen I've used. (Required: Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe and Macromedia products.) I wasn't paying much attention to Mhz or anything else - it was just whatever machines were available, some new some old.
When you get under the hood (aka Unix command line) it's as fast as most of the Sun/Solaris boxen I've used.
I suspect that there's a lot of unoptimized software out there - on MacOS X both IE and Netscape are dog slow downloading via an HTTP connection. About 100 times slower than using wget from the command line on the same machine.
It's like...
...real fast.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Other topics that are perfect for objective debate such as:
Is Emacs slow?
Is vi easy to use?
Is perl a good language?
Do you like RMS?
Is your mother ugly?
Is Christianity the best religion?
Cowboy Neal?
But wouldn't the p4 only be able to take advantage of that 3x memory bandwidth if you gave it the rambus it craves? (and put some fans on the memory too)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
When Apple was perfecting their first GUI, they realized that they could manipulate user perceptions of how fast the system was going by increasing the sensitivity on keystrokes and mouse response.
Unfortunately, they seemed to forget this along the way. I use both XP and 10.2 and find I generally work faster on XP for the sheer reason that I can make the mouse a lot more sensitive! I have dual monitors on my mac, both at 1600x1200, and it takes 3 lift-up put-downs of the optical mouse, with the senstivity put all the way up. Now on my PC with dual monitors, I can traverse the whole screen(s) quickly with one motion. The same is true of highlighting and text input. Highlighting things in 10.2 seems laborious, slow and unresponsive. Type text in also --- if they'd just speed everything up it would greatly warm perceptions around.
As for why Mach 3 instead of L4... well, here's my guess...
1. They had experience with a mass-deployed OS based on Mach 3 on Macs already (MkLinux).
2. To my knowledge, L4 has never been broadly deployed. Few things scare business more than betting the farm on an untested research OS....
3. Last I checked, L4 was GPLed. The stigma of the GPL would scare hardware developers. Not a good position to be in.
As always, this is my opinion only, and may not represent the views of my employer. :-)
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
And for the record, I think 'drag folder to hard drive, pat self on back' is a much better way to install than 'sacrifice goat, burn candles, eat goat carcass, worship at altar, double-click setup.exe, pray.'
dalamcd
moer liek CELtroid prime!!@1!
...that doesn't fix the horrid piles of ass that are Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX. :(
:(
I've been to the unsanity site, and it looks like cool stuff- but unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that I can just keep my powerbook in OS 9.... and keep finder labels and window shading without having to pay for them.
Your conclusion is correct: a PPC is better then a .357. However there are some technical errors.
The PPC (IS) produces 10 heat, the ERPPC (Clan/IS) produces 15. The Clan ERPPC does 15 damage. The IS PPC, and ERPPC both do 10 damage. The Guass Rifle produces 1 heat, and does 15 damage.
Guass rifle ammo is a nickel-ferrous slug. The guass rifle ammo does not explode if it takes a critical hit. However if the gauss rifle itself takes a critical hit the power capacitors will explode doing 20 points of damage. It is not specifically stated if a guass rifle is caseable.
The PPC can be installed in mechs less then 45 tons. The Inner Sphere PPCs weight 7 tons and could be put in a 20 ton mech. Although the resulting mech would have 6/9 movement, and only 2 tons of armour. It would not be the most practical of mechs. A more usefull mech may be a 30 tons Urbanmech with PPC. The reliable 35 tons PNT-6R Panther of the Draconis Combine is actually equiped with a PPC on the right arm. Along with its SRM 4, 4 tons of armour, and 4/6/4 movement the Panther is a capable mech.
As a Clan ERPPC only weights 6 tons, and all Clan tech is lighter and cheesier then IS tech, a 20 or 25 tons clan mech could easily support a PPC. A 25 tons Clanner with, XL engine, endo steel, 67 points of ferro-fibrous armour, and double efficiency heat sinks could streak around the field at 7/11/6 with an ER PPC, two ER Medium Lasers, and an ER Small Laser.
Partially correct. You could use PC1066 RDRAM, which is only about 50% more than PC2100 DDR RAM, or PC3500 DDR RAM, which is only about 30% more than PC2100 DDR RAM. Now, the G4 can use DDR RAM too, but it's limited by the 167 MHz SDR bus of the G4 (which is why DDR makes no difference in the benchmarks). The 133 QDR bus of the P4 doesn't limit the memory banwidth.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
However, during the latter part of the Spindler era, some truly god-awful PPC Performas came out. This poisoned the Performa name. I'm not sure if Steve killed the Performa designation or his immediate predecessor, but by the time it was killed nobody took the Performa seriously anymore and nobody shed tears over the designation's demise.
Actually there were a few Performas that kicked serious ass in their day. Gotta love that low-slung case. Vroom.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I have a 800MHz G4 TiBook, and it runs quite nicely, thank you. It could certainly be faster, and I have no idea how much of that is caused by the application, the OS, or the hardware.
What I *do* find annoying, and what slows me down no-end, is the fact that the GUI is click-to-focus, and autoraises windows.
When I am running with two monitors, and I have an application on the second screen, I don't appreciate having to move the mouse pointer and my head, in order to access the menu for that application, which is still stuck on the first screen.
APPLE: put the menus back where they belong - with the application windows! (or at least make it an option) - that's solve the problem stopping focus-follows-mouse too.
Even Microsoft 'allows' you to have 'focus-follows-mouse'...
Sigh.
Max.
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.
Yes, OS 10.1.5 on a PB550MHz w/384MB RAM is slow.
I have seen way more of that spinning beachball than i ever want to, find it difficult to use the finder because it's so slow with folders that contain more than 100 items, and am generally unimpressed with the the sluggish way the GUI behaves.
Practically any Pentium 2+ class Linux or Windows machine with 128MB of RAM or more would run circles around this machine for surfing the web/managing files/folders etc.
Mozilla is so slow under OS X that i find it a much nicer experience browsing the web via mozilla running on an x86 machine under X-Windows.
Really, the Aqua GUI is not very attractive after the first 2 'woo gee whiz' days, and quickly becomes just plain annoying.
I hate the animated window effects, and the general sluggishness of the whole desktop, along with the way that i tend to accumulate about 20 seemingly identical whitish scaled-down window icons in the dock, which makes it hard to identify which window i want to switch to.
I thought Apple would have preserved the kind of slickness and usability i had come to expect from my (admittedly minimal) use of OS9, but I was wrong. I won't be buying another Mac, at least not to run OS X on.
OS X has it's good points, but it has (in my opinion) an unacceptably slow GUI, and deserves all the bashing it gets for it.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
which means it only runs on expensive custom hardware
Don't confuse ``expensive custom hardware'' with ``hardware I don't have.'' Most of the arguments I've seen/had with people have basically boiled down to, ``I wish Apple would make this work on my computer so I can have this great product without giving them any of my money.'' Um, no.
It's interesting that OSX is more useful as a desktop Unix than Linux is (for the non-technically-inclined user, someone who may be technically competent but not used to ripping things apart and making them work when they're broken)
I haven't seriously used Linux in five or six years (well, I got a new job recently and I have to use it at work), but I consider myself a fairly technically inclined user. My previous desktop machines have always been SGI or NetBSD. I've been managing clusters of Solaris machines up until I became a full-time software developer. Now, I sit on my OS X box and write code in any of python, C, objective C, java, smalltalk, scheme, etc... (I've got a lot of projects). It is definitely the most useful desktop for me (even if I do spend most of my time in the X server).
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
If you want to run a xNIX on a G3 or lower run Yellow Dog Linux, DebianPPC or any of the other alternative free OSes that are out there. Yellow Dog installs easier and is a bit friendlier to dual boot with Classic MacOS, but Debian's a good choice if you're geekier. My G3 blue-and-white will get the dual-boot treatment eventually. I have no illusions of ever getting Jag-wire to run on it...350MHz and no Altivec/Velocity Engine/Whatever IBM calls it means no way, d00d, not even crammed with 1GB RAM.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
control + pageup or pagedown
#include <sig.h>
People are comparing Mac OS X to Linux, but that's not very fair - modern Linux is _blazingly_ fast thanks to those kernel gurus. OS X seems a bit slow compared to it, but that's just qualifies it as "slower than the fasting thing out there", which is not "slow."
10.2 is much faster - I'm glad that they got a stable, usable OS first and saved the optimzations for later. I find the speed of 10.2 for standard operations (web browsing, working in a shell) on a single-processor 800mhz G4 to be comparable to a 1.2ghz Athlon running Red Hat 7.3. (RH8 is much faster so in that case the G4 will lose...)
1) Given the prices of PC1066, RDRAM not common, but it's hardly "largely unavailable." Plenty of vendors carry it these days. It used to be rare, but it isn't anymore.
2) DDR-433 (PC 3500) RAM performs just as well as PC800 RDRAM. DDR-333 RAM performs just as well as PC-800. Both are very stable in current P4 motherboards.
3) If heat is an issue (and it shouldn't be, given the excellent choices in super-quiet fans available today) then just use DDR instead. A well made PC can run just as cool as any Apple machine. It takes premium fans and power supplies, but what do you think Apple uses?
You're comments about the P4 might have been true a year ago, but the situation is very different today, now that the P4 platform has matured.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How interesting you'd bring this up in an article about MacOS X, of all places. MacOS X is living proof that BSD is emphatically NOT dying. What's under the hood? Darwin, a full-blooded BSD descendent.
BSD dying? You wish.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The hard drive might be to blame, but then again if you are using an IDE drive, then the processor is also plays a part as all copies go through the processor. If on the other other hand you are using a SCSI drive then it will pretty much take care of itself since the controller handles most of the work itself.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Relative? Try subjective. I have become accustomed to things taking a certain period of time. I have become cognizant through the use of Macs, PCs and Unix boxes what time things get completed in. I hold the opinion that Macs are not worth the premium they command, particularly if you are AGNOSTIC towards operating systems. I use GUI's to frig with the web [browse the web, chop up pictures], all WORK that I do is done in terminal mode. I'd rather use a junk PC than a junk PPC for "fun". Games, PC. "Free" software / shareware. PC. Warez. PC. [Lets face it, I can not afford to buy myself a HOUSE yet, let alone frittering money on software that doesn't help me make money, the concept of home users paying large sums of money for software that they don't use for business/making money is absurd]. That being said, I am of the opinion that "junk PCs" are better serving their purpose. If it's not a Unix workstation, and OS X on Mot-PPC falls drastically short in my opinion of being a member of that archetype, I want a Junk PC. Do I care about mythical theoretical performance on Photoshop? No. Do I get viruses? No. Do I really need a PC or a Mot-PPC to make a living as a "computer person?" No. it's a home-Nintendo-replacement, a fun time-sink - to me.
;) that Apple is not primarily concerned with speed. If you buy a top of the line PC and a top of the line Mot-PPC at any point in time - now run SPEC. Run "openssl speed". Run a kernel compile and time it. Run the same hard drive, the same amount of memory, the same video card, but only have a different CPUI and the result always comes up the same. You get less for more money on Mot-PPC machines. Sorry.
It is not the OS's fault entirely.
- Old FreeBSD userland [3.x]. Was it compiled with -O2? Is -O2 supported on PPC stably? Is gcc capable of producing decent PPC binaries or if Apple had the know-how (see: Sun, Microsoft, Intel, Borland) to make a compiler, would it be better? Should Apple be helping the gcc team help PPC along, or deprecate Mot-PPC with something more optimizable?
- Horribly outdated kernel - microkernel is out! (Laugh at Andrew Tannenbaum , he flamed Linus about MK vs. Monolithic/modular, look who uses Minux, look who uses Linux) [note: NT isn't a true microkernel, and solaris/linux/freebsd certainly aren't, its closest relative is HURD]. Mach was dumped by the progenitors of it, CMU, in 1994. Mach to me is very silly. Linux has hackers in and out as does FreeBSD. No one hacks the Mach kernel for fun. No one gives a rat shit about Darwin. Is there anything compelling about using the Mach kernel over Linux or FreeBSD? (Except Steve Jobs zealotry concerning perpetuating the failed NeXT way of doing things.)
PPC. Its SPEC marks aren't ever published, and when SPEC is run on a Mot-PPC, the results are horrible.
It is a clear combination that makes for a rather unpleasant experience. Let's face it, Unix aint no BeOS or RT-OS, its thick. Context switches are expensive. Memory protection is real. Userland activities are fairly "slow" (note NFS being in the Linux kernel). It is protected, extensible, capable, generally secure, granular, multiuser, portable, but it is not a speed demon. It values other things before speed.
Couple Unix's thickness with Mot-PPC's clear inferiority in terms of general (not vector I'm not listening lalalalalala I don't care Photoshop lalalalala) performance, it makes for a slow concoction.
I have a G4-500-1MB+1GB ram and a new 7200FDB Maxtor with a new ATI Radeon 7000 32MB with quartz enabled I built out for a friend as reference. I don't want to hear any claims of greatness, I have verified by running Linux, Darwin (to see a lean *BSD run - and lean it is - it does almost nothing fresh off the CD), Netbsd and OS X on same-era PC, PPCs and other hardware (namely the sparc
Sun can get away with a laggy SPARC. They offer a LOT of reasons why you would ignore single CPU performance, and continue to utilize that platform [scalability, support, development platform, reliability]. Apple? No way Jose. As time goes on, and as feature sets converge, and more and more of what makes a Good OS ceases to be Novel, Apple's schloctkey hardware performance will come under increasing scrutiny.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Now I can simply complain about the keys that are involved, particularly when on a laptop.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Problematically, the G4's FSB is still 167 MHz SDR = 1.3 GB/sec. So the 2.7 GB/sec of DDR bandwidth does absolutely no good. The 2MB of L3 cache helps, but in the case where AltiVec really matters (hint: they call it 'streaming' SIMD for a reason) the data sets totally blow the 2MB of cache. Besides, the 4.2 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth on the P4 is almost as fast as the L3 cache bandwidth on the G4. If you don't believe me, just look at the new benchmarks. The DDR memory makes no difference at all.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's just old code. It hasn't really been adapted to modern machine architectures, it hasn't had the benifet of all the new algorithms and developed in modern kernels. Also, Mach was never a great microkernel to begin with and the whole BSD/Mach layering saps some performance.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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.
I'm a professional software developer that had to port a large body of code from Windows to Mac. I've also done a signifigant amount of work on *nixes. The Finder interface in 10.0 and 10.1 is unbearably slow. I haven't had enough experience with 10.2 yet to make a call. The problem seems to be twofold, poor UI, and poor implementation.
You have to understand where I'm coming from. I'm no fan of Microsoft's practices or the stability or security of their code. And I am a big fan of OS X technology. A (mostly) user friendly operating system backended to a unix system, with all the unix tools and features I love. Plus I'm not railing on the hardware architecture or the OS core. Codewarrior on OS X beats the pants off Visual Studio on Windows in just about every category. But OS X's Finder, its front door as it were to someone like me, has some serious lacks.
I'm pretty fast in Windows explorer, I have to be navigating between hundreds of source files. I've learned just about all the shortcut keys and my hands move to wherever is fastest to accomplish a given task, mouse or keyboard. When I started working on the mac I was frustrated by the amount of mouse effort I had to expend. If my hands are on the keyboard and I need to do some UI navigation I don't want to have to use the mouse. I call that poor UI. I know there are probably keys there I don't know about, but they certainly aren't readily apparent in the help files. The tab between controls functionality windows has seems to be largely missing. I'm not incapable of learning new shortcut commands, I just need to be able to find out what they are without installing 4 third party applications that add them.
The seoncd part is that the finder is just damn slow. I don't care that its shiny and round and scales perfectly. I have a ~500Mhz G4 and thats more than enough power to make sure that simple tasks like moving files around and editing source code should never EVER have a perceptible delay. Sure, maybe Windows XP might be slow on an equivalently powered PC, but you know what? I can turn off all the UI crap that comes with XP. Not so with OS X. Its about as customizable as your grandmothers sofa, the one with the plastic covering you're not allowed to sit on.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Actually, YOU are believing in the Mhz myth just as much as everyone else. Mhz doesn't mean much of anything - somewhat regardless of the pipeline as well (branch prediction can make up for longer pipelines, for example). What does matter is real world performance, and in certain area's G4's are way behind Athlon's and P4's. Altivec is great, but only helps in very specific area's (Like a Guassian Blur) but due to poor memory bandwidth can't be used in larger, more practical uses.
Finally, The Man Mr. Carmack has this to say about G4's, how a P3 _can_ be faster in certain area's, and how Altivec is not relevant for apps like games (although on x86 SIMD is very important for games). Read more here.
BTW: I think Apple has done an incredible job with it's hardware of late. I'm a Windows guy myself but for normal "desktop" users I've been continually recommending the G4 iMac's as they are great machines. G4's are fast enough for many applications and I don't feel that Mac's feel slow at all (assuming OS 10.1 or 10.2). However, I do know that when I want speed (eg: for games or 3D rendering) I'll go x86 for almost twice the speed at a fraction of the price.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
It isn't old code.
>>>>>>>>
Yes it is old code. Mach 2.x, mostly 4.4 BSD. How much improvement do you think the Apple engineers could have improved on that code base given Apple's situation before OS X was released? Of course, code doesn't rot like wood, but machine performance characteristics are very different now than they were when the code powering OS X was designed. Take a look at the Linux kernel code. There are all sorts of optimizations that depend on the general performance characteristics of the machine. These have changed, and as a result the OS X code isn't optimal for modern systems. Beyond that, there is the fact that huge improvements in VM design and microkernel performance have been introduced since Mach was designed. OS X largely lacks the advantage of those improvements. The fact that OS X is slower isn't in question here. The benchmarks are nice and simple. What I'm doing here is explaining *why* the benchmarks as are they are.
Second the BSD kernel is in the same address space as Mach and is compiled into the same file.
>>>>>>>>
Doesn't change the fact that the layering involves a layer of redundency and abstraction that hurts performance.
Further, what version of xnu you were you guys testing with? xnu has gone through a massive amount of development.
>>>>>>>>>>
10.1.5. Not 10.2, as mac-heads say when I point it out, but if you'd read the changelogs, you'd realize that the GUI was the focus of 10.2 development, not the kernel.
You can find numbers here
http://clustermonkey.org/~laz/pbook/
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
:rolls eyes:
How did this clueless post get modded up?
Anyway you said:
No it isn't that version of Mach. Apple switched versions of Mach (3.0 OSF I think it was). The BSD code is much newer than what NeXT used.
You also wrote:
They did make significant changes to the kernel. I'm on the Darwin list.
Finally you wrote:
Yes it does. having the BSD kernel in the same file, the same address space, etc, DOES increase performance.
I will say this again, so it gets through your Linux biased skull, that the version of Mach is not 2.5 (the version NeXT used). Hell it isn't even the CMU version anymore.
It is faster then the Optiplex NT 4.0 box I use at work
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...
Look at any DDR333 or DDR400 sticks lately? Notice the heatspreaders?
---
Actually, Linux is rather new code. The important parts (VM, block I/O, scheduler, memory allocators, threading code, you name it) have nearly been rewritten in the past five years, many of them in just the last two. Improvements have been made to XNU I'm sure, but I doubt Apple had enough time to make drastic overhauls to the core code. Many things in Darwin just smack of that haste. The use of Mach 3.x instead of Mach 4.x, the use of 4.4 BSD instead of FreeBSD, the rather contrived layering of BSD and Mach, you name it. Apple has been very busy working on the other parts of OS X, like Aqua, Quartz, etc. Ideally for Apple, they would have just ported the OpenStep APIs (which are portable to begin with...) to a modern BSD. OS X would have immediatly started life with catagory-leading performance instead of catagory-trailing performance. The Apple developers would have an instant community of developers. But clearly, they didn't have the time to do that and develop Aqua at the same time, so how much work could they really have done in the kernel? For example, they added a unified VM/buffer-cache to XNU. But apparently, OS X has some bad behavior where a large amount of file I/O will cause process pages to be thrown out of RAM. Such a problem is traditionally an issue with unified VMs, but fixes for that behavior were published by Sun (among others) years ago. Given the importance of media professionals to Apple's business, you'd think they would have splurged $50 for a copy of Solaris Internals to find out about the fix. Of course they would have, but they most likely didn't have the time to.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I am running mandrake cooker with kde 3.1 on a 400mhz g4 powerbook and NO these macs are NOT slow :) Otoh osx does feel sluggish on it. I always assumed osx being based on freebsd would share bsd's rapidity. So you're saying they rewrote it in a language that compiles into slower binaries?
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Suggestion if you haven't heard it before, get more RAM. OS X just loves memory. Get as much as you can cause RAM is cheap these days and you'll love the improvement. I suggest you pick up 2 512 MB chips and fill 'er up to the max. Next in line would be a faster GPU, get the best graphics card you can... hopefully an AGP so you can really take advantage of Quartz Extreme. RADEOn 7000 or 8500 will do just fine. Then get a nice fast hard drive. Find a good 7200 rpm drive IDE is fine.
Total cost for this stuff will be around $400 and worth every penny.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
GET more RAM!!!!! 256 is just not enough for OS X... minimum of 512 MB. 'nuff said.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
What ever you do, go get a nice graphics card first... an AGP RADEON 7000 or 8500 at least. Quartz Extreme really does make all the difference.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Megahertz myth only extended to at most double mhz compare your 400 - 450 G4 with 800-1Ghz Intels and you've got a much better comparison. 1.8 ghz is what, more than 4 times the clock speed. We all know that Apple has screwed us on processors (well mostly Motorola but anyways), that doesn't mean that the OS sucks.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Yeah if MS Word was 'built in' to OS X at the lowest level you'd see an improvement as well. I also get a 10 sec load on Word... but then how often do I load and unload Word. If I really wanted it always available to open .Doc files I would have loaded it at my last startup 3 months ago and just left it running.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Let me say that I absolutely love Macs and I want one of the new Mac OSX machines. Maybe a little faster than the current version might be nice but that is just because I like blinding speed. Not that my other machines are as fast, but if I was going to drop the cash for that dream system with the screen you can edit a real film on, I'd like something insane.
The latest Mac with Jaguar etc. is plenty fast to drive that huge screen and other apps. However I can tell the machine itself could be driving the finder much faster. Also sometimes I see multitasking delays which BeOS would never show. But otherwise, I like it! Apple continues to build great technology into their consistently fast machines, but as other people have said that pipeline will have to be fatter and add a few more CPUs to make it an SGI killer.
For reference, on my box here at work in Windows XP Mozilla feels as responsive as any other app, in fact it uses the theming APIs too so it even looks like native apps (that makes more of a difference than you might think). In Redhat 8 at work (what i now use mostly) it also feels rather snappy, at least as fast as on Windows. On Linux at home it feels much slower, even though they're the same build, and on OS X I've found it feels even slower than that (getting to the unusably slow point). BTW, for that comparison I used the RadialMenus extension - that is a good way of getting a feel for how fast Gecko is throwing boxes around the screen.
The slow UI speed of Mozilla on OS X is caused almost entirely by lack of optimizations in the low level Gecko Quartz drawing layer. Linux had similar problems in the 0.9.x releases, Mozilla was seriously abusing X (a sample trace i saw suggested it was redrawing parts of the screen several times over). Those kind of issues have been largely resolved lately, in part because companies like RedHat have been paying people to work full time on good Mozilla support, and partly because the for the longest time Mozilla Linux builds were shipping without even -O2 optimizations (a gcc flag) because it caused instability on a small number of machines. I think that whatever those instability issues were, they've been resolved, as Mozilla on Linux is now acceptably fast.
Remember that Mozilla is mostly load-on-demand, ie stuff like the mail components, the irc components (even the xul components) are loaded only when needed. People who accuse it of bloatware tend to overlook the fact that the only components Navigator loads that say Chimera doesn't are the XUL objects, and the RDF template engine (a part of xul) - combined these start in easily under a second, and don't really affect performance once underway as Gecko is very fast.
Apples response to this issue could have been, "we'll make Mozilla faster on OS X", but instead it was "we'll write a native front end to it". That's a lot of duplicated code: for what? Lickable widgets that Mozilla had support for anyway? Developing Chimera was the popular option, but looking with a wide perspective they could have got better results by sponsoring the aqua native widgets effort and improving the Mozilla quartz layer.
The reason the kernel is slower than under Linux, is mainy that the Mac OS X kernel is designed to deliver the best overall performance, not the best optimal performance. This means that when you put a machine under heavy load, the speed of those kernel operations under Linux takes a sharp nosedive (way below the Mac OS X numbers), while those of Mac OS X stay more or less the same. This is quite important for semi-realtime applications such as audio/midi processing, digital video etc.
The fact that it is based on a microkernel doesn't matter, because the Mac OS X kernel is not a microkernel anymore. The whole kernel runs in one address space (so no message passing between different kernel components), just like in Linux. They still kept the different parts of the kernel more or less distinct in the source, but this is simply for easier maintenance.
Donate free food here
The title should have been "Is Aqua slow?". Because I think the GUI is on most people's minds when talking about the speed of OS X.
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>
Someone brought up which is fastest - Carbon or Cocoa.
And someone said that "near the metal" there was no discernable difference.
However, if you code i Cocoa, you will get noticably smaller codebase sizes, and i think that alone explains some of the speedups you get in cocoa apps - try Chimera vs. Mozilla as an example.
I have a G4 Ti Powerbook. The UI was a little slow when I first installed it but I bumped the memory up to 512Mb and now it's fine. 256Mb is not enough for OS X.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
This old chestnut. STILL?
I haven't found anyone who I consider to be sufficiently experienced in both macs and PCs to be able to make this judgement call!
I have a little bit of Mac experience and a little bit more Windows experience and a smattering of linux. (i.e. I support 80 mac users, 12 Linux Servers, 20 Linux users and about 1200 PC users as a member of a team of 8) in a banking environment: these users are possibly the least technical people you can imagine.
Watching someone with no computer experience at all sit down at a bunch of different interfaces is VERY interesting: The thing that apple have got really really right is only having one mouse button. Everything is straightforward and one clickable. OS X is the easiest thing in the world to get going with when you know nothing.
Mind you, watching a user sit down at WindowsXP was an education: It really is surprisingly intuitive once you explain the concept of a "start" button to them (i.e. "All your programs are in the start button") and it is far and away better than any previous version of windows. People just have trouble with the "right click" and "object-properties" concepts. Once they have got the idea of thinking in terms of everything being an interactive object, instead of a "flat-TV like model" they are well away, and actually seem to find the Mac approach a little frustrating.
Linux is just a pig. Sorry guys, it is getting better and better all the time, but in the usability stakes it is still playing catchup. By 2005, I expect Linux will be the desktop OS it wants to be. It is soooo close...but to watch a new user sit down at it with 10 minutes of coaching....they still look just as bewildered by the time they log off and walk away.
With regards to software installs.....XP vs Mac...and windows 2000, you put the CD in...the software installs. It really is that simple.
Speedwise, we found OS X on any G3 machine is quick enough....but somehow 'feels' sluggish. That is all I can describe it as. The OS responds visually to a click almost immediately...but you still end up waiting for results. It is more a problem with the user interface than the actual OS. Saying that, on the newer G4 machines (with a good amount of RAM) it feels great. Truly stunning.
Windows2000 look and feel is awful. The OS just holds you up when mousing around.
WindowsXP....again....if your PC is an Athlon with plenty of RAM XP feels great. Run it on anything slower, and it starts to feel bogged down.
A long post, but as we have just done a usability study on all these OS's I felt it was valid input. Hope you all agree.
P.S. Why do people use a P.S. on an e-mail: Couldn't they just edit it in using a text editor....Hang on....D'OH!
I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago; I bought a G4/450 cube. The OS/X public beta came out around the same time, and I bought it, and was pretty disappointed. Found it painfully slow and lacking in useful native apps. So I kept spending all of my time in OS 9.
Then 10.0 came out; I installed it, and still found it painfully slow. Tried using it a while, but ended up going back to OS 9 and staying there.
Then, around the time that 10.1 came out, I bumped my system RAM from 128 to 384. That and installing 10.1 made the system finally fast enough for day-to-day use in OS/X. The machine still felt very sluggish browsing the web compared to my Windows box at work, but I couldn't blame that on the OS: IE wasn't any faster under OS 9 than it was under OS/X. And at that point, no browser on any platform seemed anywhere near as fast to me as IE on windows.
Nowadays, with the upgrade to 10.2 (my machine can use Quartz Extreme), Chimera for my web browsing, and another RAM upgrade, the machine feels quite snappy. It might still be slower than the 1.something GHz Pentium I use at work, but the difference is much smaller now, and nonexistent in terms of its impact on usability.
While some things, like window resizing and menu opening and so on still feel slower than they did under OS 9, Jaguar scales to handle large numbers of running applications much better than 9 did; It's not uncommon for me to have 8-10 programs running at once, many actively doing some work.That would have been pretty hopeless under OS 9.
Basically, I consider this to be desktop computing nirvana. Well, almost. When my new 1 GHz PowerBook gets here in a few weeks, that will be desktop computing nirvana.
It not just with the latest OS from Apple, either. I installed Windows XP on an IBM 600 (PII don't recall the speed) laptop for sh*ts and giggles expecting it to perform like crap. It runs quite well. Granted, it was running NT 4 SP6 before.
I've seen OS X breath new life into Lombards and iBooks. It's like that movie Awakenings...
--Mike
Hmm IIRC even a preemtible or law latency Linux kernel beat the Mac kernel in benchmarks, but I may be wrong.
loply.com
The Urbanmech is damn slow: 2/3/2 movement. It sports an AC/10, a small laser, and 6 tons of armour. It is basically a (slightly) mobile gun turret. It is more useless then it looks.
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
The Finder is much faster in 10.2, probably mostly due to Quartz Extreme. It does still feel slightly sluggish when doing some things. Usually when you start to do a task, then once you're doing it it is fast.
I'm pretty fast in Windows explorer, I have to be navigating between hundreds of source files. I've learned just about all the shortcut keys and my hands move to wherever is fastest to accomplish a given task, mouse or keyboard. When I started working on the mac I was frustrated by the amount of mouse effort I had to expend. If my hands are on the keyboard and I need to do some UI navigation I don't want to have to use the mouse. I call that poor UI. I know there are probably keys there I don't know about, but they certainly aren't readily apparent in the help files. The tab between controls functionality windows has seems to be largely missing. I'm not incapable of learning new shortcut commands, I just need to be able to find out what they are without installing 4 third party applications that add them.
First, there are a fair number of shortcut keys that one can learn to speed things up. I got my first Mac recently and have learned many of them because I've got a laptop, which makes mousing even more painful for me.
Second, there's a number of utilities out there to improve the Finder's functionality. I would highly recommend LiteSwitch X if you miss the way Windows handles alt-tabbing. If there's something you don't like about the Finder, someone has almost invaribly written something to fix it for you, including the ability to create your own keyboard shortcuts. VersionTracker is a good place to start for that. I know there's one or more freeware apps that provide you with the ability to assign shortcut keys, so you might want to check that out as well.
All that said, I do wish that the Finder were somewhat more responsive, and that it came with more configuration options out of the box. I've noticed that many of the builtin MacOS X option panels are extremely dumbed down and don't provide GUI access to a lot of the more complicated options that exist in some of the underlying applications (samba and ftp are two that spring to mind in this category).
Max Payne and Warcraft III both perform extremely well on my 800Mhz TiBook, just to add a couple more titles intothe mix. They both do better than they did on a year-old Toshiba laptop with similar specs (including a GeForce 2 Go) to the TiBook. And with the TiBook I get that nice wide aspect ratio... yum.
Deep inside macosx is microkernel based. Freebsd is not.
Therefore, noway macosx can be same fast as freebsd, assuming they will run on the same hardware, which situation is not possible or at least any such benchmarks are not published. Or are they?
Less is more !
Sluggish is a great word for this. What I've noticed is that once you have something open or are in the process of doing something (like resizing), it goes lighting fast. But it seems to take OSX a moment to realize 'Oh hey, you want to resize this window'. I get around this by using keyboard shortcuts extensively, as well as LiteSwitch X for moving between apps.
Of course this doesn't fix the problem I am having getting back to this window because my bird is sitting on my touchpad....
I couldn't agree more. On a reasonably old iMac, operations that take essentially no time at the shell can take several minutes using the dreaded Finder. The time to delete or copy a large chunk of files is amazing - several minutes with the GUI, but instantaneous with rm or cp. I now use the command line almost exclusively for file management in OX, which is too bad....
I agree with that. Actually, it's worse because I don't think HFS+ (the default file system) handles directories as well as a traditional unix file system. DiskWarrior literally takes five or six hours to defrag my 10 gig iBook. It takes well less than an hour to do the same job on my kids' OS9 iMac.
Clear, Dark Skies
Another interesting tidbit to read (use login/pass "archives", without the quotes) is this.
Donate free food here
I hope it doesn't sound too harsh to say that you are talking out of your ass. I have a P-4 i850E PC with PC1066 RDRAM. You can lay your finger on the heatspreader and it is barely warm to the touch. Any memory that is running at 400-533MHz is going to need some thermal management.
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BTW, dual-channel RDRAM's latency is pretty low-- as low as DDR or SDRAM:
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?art
"You might be surprised by the significant reduction in latency seen with PC1066 over PC800. As addresses are sent 33% faster and the data returns from memory 33% sooner, latency is, according to Cachemem, 30% lower."
http://www.2cpu.com/Hardware/iwill_dp400/index_
"It looks like my assumptions were correct. The use of the CRIMMs does indeed introduce some extra latency to the RDRAM mix. Again, it isn't a huge amount, but the difference is definitely there. If you look at those MPX/DDR numbers, it makes you wonder why anyone ever complained about RDRAM's latency to begin with. Heh."
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10.2 runs perfectly fine on this machine, though it's ATI Rage128 Pro doesn't take advantage of the new OpenGL rendering engine.
I compile applications (both standard *nix ports and Aqua apps I've written myself), encode MP3's and MP4's, all without a performance problem.
Note that the current iMacs have significantly more "umph" than my G4, so they work even better.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Okay, I've done it again and been less than clear. Mach (the Kernel of Darwin/Mac OS X) is written in C (using GCC - just like Linux).
Up from that the Objective-C runtime is also written in C (and can be called from C). This is actually a VERY quick system. You can call Cocoa from C if you want (but honestly, Objective-C is much easier you're better off using that). And there are ways to making Objective-C messages faster if that is needed (most of the time it isn't).
Objective-C isn't a slow language as implemented by Apple, but they don't use it in the Kernel anyway. Actually it's not used in the BSD adaptor layer or even the lower levels of Cocoa (Core Foundation). But it isn't anything to be afraid of, it's fast.
Well you're part right - Mac OS X is (largely) a rewrite of NeXTSTEP (or to give it NeXT's revised name OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach).
All the interdependancies between OpenStep (the API Specification that Cocoa is a development on) were removed by NeXT when NeXTSTEP transitioned to OPENSTEP for Mach (usually just called "OPENSTEP") and OPENSTEP was also available on Solaris and even WindowsNT. So Apple could have quite easily used a different base OS for Mac OS X.
But it turns out that Mach is still a good choice even now (and Apple believed it to be the BEST choice - something I personally agree with). Much has changed down there deep in the OS - they are using a later version of Mach (with Apple's own customisations) and they are using a different BSD adaptor layer (here there are some commercial reasons as well as technical). They are also using a totally new windowmanager.
Much has changed in the OS, I agree that it's still quintessentially NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP but Apple have significantly updated the OS (I guess it's almost like OPENSTEP 5.x for Mac).
Yeah the Finder was a major pain in 10.0 and a pain in 10.1 - in Mac OS X 10.2 - it's an irritation. Progress has been quite good (but I still find the Finder to be a little lacking).
You wanna know what - it's a Carbon app! Now there is no reason Carbon apps need to be slow (hard to write, maybe). Personally I don't really understand why the most important single App was written this way - I don't know. But it has got significantly better between 10.1 and 10.2 - I think it has some way to go yet - but it's okay now.
The list of thing includes:
- rendering of the same HTML by Mozilla;
- rendering of the same XML by Cocoon;
- performing the same query in PostgreSQL database;
- byte-code compilation of the same package of scripts by Python;
- byte-code compilation of the same code by Elisp;
- LaTeX document rendering;
- GCC compilation of the same code;
- execution of various Apache CGI scripts;
- running of OpenOffice;
- running X11;
The list could be even longer, but many software (interpereters, APIs, servers) I need for my work is not compiled under Macosx at all or not in the version I need.I understand that Photoshop runs on Macosx faster than on Linux b/c there is no Photoshop for Linux. That's why I compared performace on equal examples.
I've spent 6 months trying to love Macosx without any success. Probably I demand too much from that grandma-oriented OS.
Less is more !
... although when I have the "Helios" screensaver running as the desktop wallpaper on my 1600x1024 Cinema Display and then I open two overlapping transparent Terminals my G4 Dual 867 does lose its responsiveness a little.
But seriously, Apple is forward-thinking all the time. Jaguar may be decidedly slow on older hardware (still quite usable, however), but the latest G4 machines make Jaguar scream. The next generation of processors will be faster still, and the OS is poised to make full use of it.
Today, drop shadows. Tomorrow, ray-traced shadows!
-- thinkyhead software and media
Bzzt, sorry, thank you for playing, but that's not what I meant at all. By turn off all the crap I mean the flashy chrome attached to the UI in XP. Yes I know that you can switch to the command line or X11 in OS X, but I still want GUI navigation through files. I want the finder, I just don't want it to be slow.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Your absoluetly right, of course this isn't the only reason it is / appears slow, but Stepwise (stepwise.com) did do a comparison and noted the difference reguarding how you setup your Swap file, they also published user instructions on how to use a dedicate swap partition.
:).
Having the Swap File on a seperate disk makes a big difference, even having the Swap File on a dedicate partition on a disk makes a difference (though of course not as much as more RAM
Though it should be noted that, IIRC this was still using a Swap File on a Disk (and not a Swap Filesystem) unless I remeber wrongly. The issue of having inreased overhead by having to do file IO rather than simple direct-to-disk writes is interesting!
The sad thing is that many media users would benifit from even being able to decide what disk to put their swap file on, but they aren't technical enough to be confortable doing it and the user interface/installer doesn't provide any easy way of doing it.
Quartz is the drawing technology in Mac OS X - like X-Windows in a traditional Uinx or Linux system. This part of the Mac OS isn't open source, so the only way to get it is to get a Mac running Mac OS X.
Modern Macs run a version of Quartz called "Quartz Extreem" basically a version where all the on screen windows (and everything on the screen in Mac OS X considered a window from this point of view) is composited onto the display by the GPU.
If you're interested in programming Quartz take a look at Apple's site in the developer section for information about Quartz.
Quartz includes the ability to render PDFs, QuickTime, OpenGL. Quartz also has the ability to deal with transparency, that is heavily used in the UI of Mac OS X (Aqua).