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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 mean it crashes all the time and sends your personal data to a marketing firm?
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
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
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?
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
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
I asked my mac to get me a beer from the fridge, and I am still waiting.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
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
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
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).
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...
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
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)
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.
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?
It is still missing some features I like and is obviously still under development. But the recently released 0.6 version is pretty amazing.
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.
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
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 ?
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.
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?
I haven't dismissed OS X yet. When it's matured as much as Windows 2K has, then I think it will really shine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
In fact I liked 9 better than 10.1 until 10.2 was released.
and so, logically, when 10.2 was released, you liked 10.1 better than 9?
Just checking.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
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.
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
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.
That's almost hard to believe. Perhaps the kerberos software they're running has fscked the computers. My computer has much much less than half the processing power of a flat panel imac, but I've never had that kind of problem.
Not that it isn't slow... it just isn't *that* slow.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
"You mean it crashes all the time and sends your personal data to a marketing firm?"
:)
Not that I like Microsoft all that much, and you're probably just joking, but....
I just upgraded from an almost constantly crashing Win98 install to WinXP Pro, and over the course of a few weeks so far, I have not had anything but single apps crash a few times...No reboot-requiring freezes whatsoever. Quite a nice break from Win98 freezing before it even finished booting sometimes
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
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.
- 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?
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
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."
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
yes, they use 2D hardware acceleration for drawing. So did Mac OS 9 (and 8, and 7) .. Quartz Extreme is something completely different. It doesn't accelerate drawing, it accelerates compositing
Quartz has two parts:
-- Tim Buchheim
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 !
+1 bonus
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
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.
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. :')
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.
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...
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.
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.
Those responsible for the previous corrections have been sacked. :)
Let us not forget that Cocoa can be used from C++ and Carbon from Obj-C - and that you can always just use plain C or C++ and Carbon if your application absolutely cannot waste time on dynamic type checking. I've gotten fond of Cocoa lately, but I'm working on an audio application that needs almost ridicuously low latency, so I have to have fairly fast callbacks - so I'm doing it in Carbon. The extra pain in the GUI is worth the performance for this case, altho it may not be so for all things.
The only problem I have with the operating system UI is the lack of window shading.
;)
You need.... WindowShade X
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/wsx/
That's right... now you can get WindowShade functionality in OSX... only better.
please note, I don't work for unsanity... I just like their stuff
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
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?
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!
The interface is slow... the kernal is slow... fine and dandy but how about some numbers. First the systems TiBook 800, iBook 500? (it is at work and I forget precisely), G4 tower 400, G3 Desktop 300, Apple 7300 (200 mhz). All system have maximum amount of memory accessible by the hardware/installable in given slots.
Now two observations 1 Darwin no longer runs on the 7300. I have used this box as a database server and had good results. Apple fix this. Second the G3 systems are noticably slower as far as windowing.
Now is MacOS X slow? Yes as far as accessing memory. No as far as crunching numbers. And Yes as far as the window server is concerned. Yes as far as running OS 9 native apps is concerned, and yes as far as running anything that is not built on the Objective C Cocoa API's.
Data
MySQL look ups take longer on the TiBook (fastest system) than my Athalon Ghz system running Linux (Red Hat 7), but just slightly as in the difference is less than my reaction time at a console window, note I realize this is not a valid test, and have watched processor time and observed the macintosh to take about 1.3 times the time of the pc to do the same query and exit as on the macintosh using a cloned database.
Crunching numbers using altivec accelerated code (simple data analysis on large amounts of data) the Mac wins the G4 400 is roughly equivalent to the Athalon and the Ti Book runs a process that takes 30 sec on the PC in about 23 seconds. Sorry I can't distribute code.
Is the window server really slow? I don't think slow comparing the TiBook to a coworker's Dell laptop (the tiBook has an impressively better screen) running XP. but I would like to see some method of comparison. Notably the G4 400 running 10.2 has issues, Quartz Extreme is not supported on this machine and thus this machine is noticably slower refreshing the screen and drawing windows. I believe 10.1.5 is actually faster on the four systems that run it. But can't prove it with numbers.
Those are the numbers. To summarize, use native applications Omniweb is a great browser, or write your own, Cocoa is much easier than programming for X. Provide your Mac with plenty of memory (but same goes for XP, Linux, and BeOS). And if you really want to play games buy a GameCube or Playstation. And write Apple and tell them to fix bugs, post more of the Operating System as Open Source, adding hardware support, to encourage Cocoa not Carbon (doesn't help that that Apple uses the "Carbon" code name for the API derived from Classic and for the General API for OS X including Cocoa") and not focus on adding features.
Oh and in case anyone had any doubts I have been a Macintosh user since my LC in 1989,and I happen to enjoy being a Macintosh Zealot.
Take IE, for example. It seems to wait to display the page until it has the whole thing ready to render. On a big slashdot story, that can take a while. Compare to, say, most browsers on Linux, which seem to display while the page is still downloading. Browsing seems way faster on my home system on a 144 Kbit/second connection with Linux than it does at work on OS X on a T3.
On the other hand, I do have evidence that the Mac is actually slow. E.g., when I start to load a slashdot page at work, I often give up, switch over to the XP machine on the KVM switch, and go load it there, and finish ahead of the Mac. The XP machine is an ancient P2 400 with 384 megs of RAM, the Mac is an ancient B&W G3 300 MHz with about 600 meg of RAM, so the machines are comparable (both pathetic by modern standards, but comparable). So, it actually appears that the Mac is slow at browsing, and IE works in such a way to emphasize that slowness, making it seem unbearably slow.
Also, a lot of apps, and Finder, aren't as threaded as they could be. While IE, for instance, is busy getting that big slashdot page ready to display, the dreaded spinning color-ball shows up, so you can't switch back and view the other pages you were reading.
Finally, much Apple software IS slow. There's a thread on comp.sys.mac.advocacy about this right now, where someone was saying that the new generation of iApps seem slower than the previous iApps, and pointing out an apparent correlation between those written in Carbon (fast) and Cocoa (slow). However, other people have pointed out examples of fast Cocoa apps, so that is not the problem. Most interesting was someone who wrote their own photo manager, and compared to iPhoto. For some things, his is 2 orders of magnitude faster than iPhoto. Evidently, Apple simply used crappy algorithms in iPhoto. Apple's mail program is similarly problematic when mailboxes get large. A lot of people on comp.sys.mac.advocacy have given up on it and switched to Eudora, and report their Macs are nice and fast at mail then.
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.
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...
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
I use an iMac to do some video editing and rendering to VCD, and I've noticed that if I switch from iMove to, say Finder, then the CPU usage of the iMovie render drops dramatically, and the estimated render time shoots up.
It looks like resources are being allocated for the foregorund application - even if it doesn't need them - presumably to improve the user's perception of performance.
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
Of course I'm using 10.1 - I've heard but I would like to see substantiated independently that 10.2 is a lot snappier. I am still mulling if I should acceed to the daylight robbery price Apple is charging to upgrade.
And hopefully mine won't get totally lost in the shuffle.
;), etc. ... all are MUCH faster on my old ass frankenstein G3 than on his brand spanking new Gateway. My Gateway owning roomie will even attest to this, and now he's kicking himself for not getting a Mac (partially due to Sherlock, actually).
;)
... it is custom made to organize data on Mac OS X drives in a way that speeds up the operations of the OS by orders of magnitude. Just did it last night and it cut my app launch time in HALF - and this is in contrast to doing regular Speed Disk optimizations and only seeing a hair of difference. So see if you can find it on LimeWire, its AMAZING, really makes OS X fly, especially on older hardware like I have.
Just from an average user's perspective (which I am not, but my roomates are), Mac OS X shreds the living daylights out of WinXP.
Case in point - my roomates new Gateway 2.4 GHz machine w/ WinXP Home is SLOW as all getout opening apps, drawing windows, traversing directories w/ lots of files in them, etc.
By contrast, the G3 I built from parts (420 MHz G3, 768 MB RAM, 2 7200 HDs on a 66 MHz bus) is faster in day to day activities like web browsing, using Office, using Sherlock (oh wait, only Mac users get Sherlock
So, is OS X slow? Answer: an unequivacable NO. Is it instantaneous? well, NO. But we're getting there
BTW - and this will be of interest to fellow Mac users - there is a Norton Speed Disk profile for OS X floating around the web
You wrote:
Um the BSD part being old is wrong. Apple borrowed some stuff from FreeBSD. xnu uses an older version of the FreeBSD kernel for the BSD part of the kernel. Further there is no such thing as "4.4 BSD-lites-2". There is the last version that came out of Barlely known as 4.4 BSD-lite but, I have no idea where you get the 2 in that.
Did I say it would be twice as fast as it is now? Get a clue. Don't put words in my mouth. I simply said that there were a number of changes and that it was faster. By your reasoning, everything must be a crtain way to your expectations or there is something wrong with it.
What you don't seem to understand is that Apple (and NeXT) used Mach for porting reasons. Think about it. What happens when Apple switches processor families again, if the code isn't as portable as it could be. To be blunt, the Linux kernel is not that portable and it take a lot of work to do it (PPC users of Linux would understand).
You also wrote:
That isn't very nice. I quoted exactly what you said. If you didn't mean what you said then you should have written it differently.
Tell me something, just what background do you have? My impression from reading your posts, is someone who thinks they know everything because they ran a test on the kernels (you did make a lot of factual errors).
I'm not going to comment further as I'm getting tired of trying to correct someone who thinks they know everything.
FYI, I'm not a kernel developer (and neither are you) but, I get my info from the developers themselves which, you didn't
Another interesting tidbit to read (use login/pass "archives", without the quotes) is this.
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