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Making Operating Systems Faster
mbrowling writes "In an article over at kernelthread.com Amit Singh discusses 'Ten Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster'. The theme seems to be that since you won't run into 'earth-shattering algorithmic breakthroughs' in every OS releases, what're you gonna do to bump your performance numbers higher? Although the example used is OS X, the article points out that Windows uses the same approach."
...to make OS X faster is to stop having it render the GUI through Photoshop filters.
You've got to be kidding me. XP is CRAZY slower than 2k. I suppose thats what happens when you add a Microsoft+ package to Windows 2000. Wanna make it faster? Disable all the useless services and shut off the ugly eye candy. *sigh*.
adventure-today.com
why does my 3ghz p4 choke on spellchecking a 50k doc with a 500mb text editor (Word2k3) ?
why does explorer choke on listing 10,000 files ?
why should i ever upgrade my word processing applications ? or can they type for me now ?
bah, innovation is dead, shame
Hard Drive
Largest bottleneck in any modern system. If you've never had the opportunity to use a 15krpm (or something faster) system, do it now. It flies... I don't care if it is Windows or what... it doesn't matter when you've got usable bandwidth to the biggest chunk of storage out there.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
#1) Perhaps they should've done it on the webserver too!
So pretty much, Mac and Windows are made faster by using resources when they're not being used already. Not a genius idea, but the hard part is figuring out how to do that, which is what the article discusses.
I haven't looked into it for a while (mod me down for being uncertain if you like), but I seem to recall that there were serious leaps and bounds still left in OSX performance, with a change to the ABI register use, potentially, in the future
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Check out www.blackviper.com, it's one of the better sites dedicated to tuning and increasing performance of Windows 2000/XP
More hamsters!
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
1. remove bloat ...
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
What takes genius is getting every ounce of speed from a Linux or Windows box that can be a conglomeration of different motherboards, CPUs, graphics cards, hard disks, etc.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
And the fact that I won't be discouraged from keeping 10.3 or 10.4 on that system if the next version doesn't support my hardware through annoying EULAs.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I wish these were incorporated into linux more. I don't care what anyone says, comparing windows and linux on the same machine has always shown to ME that windows seems a lot faster. Applications take longer to load in linux. Mozilla for example, takes longer to load than it did in windows on the same computer. Other applications that I can't compare directly seem to take a while when they're just small apps.
Aparently, windows caches a bunch of stuff and has a bunch other little hacks that allows this. So why can't linux and the kde people do this. They've copied everything else, why not this?
Before you mod me as flamebait or troll, I switched over to linux a while ago and I have no intention on going back to windows. I'm not some ms fanboy bitching about my 10 minute experience with linux. All I'm saying is that here are some points where linux annoys me.
After the government changes in the US and the DOJ is free to investigate monopolism in software again...
How hard would it be to make the case that consumers would be advantaged by gaining access to just a basic o/s?
It mightn't be easy because the courts are legal organs not technical forums, but with a disciplined argument based on metrics derived from the types of performance issues noted in the article... an articulate, intelligent lawyer might get this done.
Right?
Step 1: Buy a G5 Mac.
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
Is it just me or are the first six items all caching schemes?
Throw faster hardware at it.
...someone who RTFA and can summarize it for us lazy people. That's exactly what Apple did.
1) Don't install so much crap on your computer. 5 megapixel photos set as wallpaper along with Real Player, Gator Spyware Crap, Quicktime Task, HP scanner registration reminder sofware, webshots, Norton anything, MS office bar etc running on startup will make your nice shiny new computer run like an arthritic snail on sleeping tablets.
2) Turn off some of the eyecandy. All those fades and whooshes and stuff don't actually do anything useful, they just consume CPU cycles and waste your time.
3) Use Ad Aware and SpyBot regularly to keep scumware out of your computer. I had to clean up a PC this morning which had stopped working because the BASTARDS at NewDotNet wrote some software which fucked the TCP/IP stack backwards.
4) Defrag regularly and run MSCONFIG to check what crap is sneaking back on to your Startup scripts.
BTW, Windows 3.1 sitting on MSDOS 6.2 ran like shit of a stick on my old P133. I wonder if/how it would run on a modern system?
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
upgrading from 2K to XP on the same hardware will slow you down. Upgreading from OS X 10.2 to 10.3 on the same hardware will give you speed improvements a majority of the time.
I can see how they can write an artice about how apple did this but to claim that Microsoft does it too. I don't see how. Unless Microsoft has improvements but enough of the new things they add slow it down so much more the gain is outweighted by the loss.
Evolution or ID?
Apple, and other system vendors need to consider these types of management issues when making a change. Speed improvements are only good if they are "management friendly"
... prelinking.
What distro are you using?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The number one thing they should do IMHO is reduce overhead. Using Microsoft Windows as an example, windows 98 has much less overhead than 2k, which in turn has much less than XP. A lot of it is eye-candy, which is all well and good, but those should be options that are OFF by default. XP differs from previous versions because it uses a 'shell' based gui (similar to KDE / GNOME, etc), which, while nice, is going to cause some system slowdown. Using the 'explorer' shell, which is heavily intergrated into the Windows OS, is the fastest, and should be the default. Then if people want to change it to look pretty they can, by sacrificing speed (in slower machines).
Stop adding services / features that are on by default, and you'll see a huge improvement in speed.
1. remove bloat
2. ??
3. profit!
Problem with this is that it's things the user needs to do. The article is about what apple did that is independant of the user.
Evolution or ID?
all I can say is that I was on an ibook 933mhz that was loaded up with programs, I hit the expose key and it was FAST.
This comes through rendering GUI through the graphics card. Something linux will have trouble with due to GLP vs binary drivers from NVIDIA and ATI.
I floated the idea a while back that we need "open source" hardware designs so that there is a open design for a fast graphics card.
All the cards are basically made in taiwan fabs from designs from elsewhere anyway. The only problem is patents....
Anyway... You are completely correct but...
/usr, /opt partition, whichever one you have all of your applications installed on. Copy the hard drive to the ram drive at bootup. DD can do it quickly if you just zap the whole partition across. I think there are mount options to tell the Linux filesystem buffer not to cache a particular filesystem.
My 2 words are RAM DRIVE. You think you can't justify 4Gb of RAM? Course you can.
Dedicate 2-3Gb of it to a ram drive and mount it as your root,
The difference in performance can be stunning.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Why do you think it takes three minutes for your Windoze box to start up?
Of course one could argue that is worth making the GUI faster to give an apparent speed increase whilst allowing improvments in CPU/Disk to carry the rest of the OS. Then again of course I know nothing about system design
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Hard Drive is the bottleneck........ Has anyone tried using a RAMdisk as their OS drive? I've read a lot and heard of people trying, but never come across a comprehensive how-to + review. With the amount of ram we can have nowadays (new pc's coming with 6 banks for dual-channel DDR), I'd pay $250 for an extra 2GB of ram in order to have my OS + key apps run off of that. Other solutions? (CF too slow?)...
Download yourself the latest cutting-edge gcc from the 3.5.0 branch on CVS and do a make bootstrap. Install this over your original C compiler.
Get the latest 2.6.7-preX kernel from kernel.org and configure it with no modules: everything build it. Modules slow you down.
Enable all the EXPERIMENTAL drivers. They are ususally much faster than the old ones that may have been in the kernel now for 6 or more months.
When you have saved your configuration, hack the top level Makefile to add "-O9 -fomit-instructions" in the CFLAGS macro.
time gmake -j64 bootstrap. Even if you have a single CPU system, building with lots of processes in parallel is faster because it soaks up CPU idle time when waiting on I/O operations.
Enjoy.
Stick Men
Perhaps we should look at the other side of this equation. Namely, "What makes each new OS release appear slower".
I for one cannot honestly say that I think WinXP is any faster than Win2K, nor was Win2K any faster than Win98, and so on.Now naturally I relize that individual components become faster. But the overall feel seems to slow down each release. The same thing applies to Linux, in the form of each new release of taking longer to login and initialize.
Early versions of some film scanner software that I worked on were terribly slow. A quick profile of the running code showed that about 10% of the time was spent in a little piece of code called TtoF(). This code parsed and coverted text into floats.
The earliest versions of the software did not convert key preference/calibration/setup files into internally stored numerical values -- instead, anytime the code needed a calibration/setup value, it went to the file, read it, and converted it. Needless to say, that "feature" was quickly corrected.
That's not as bad as an early VAX image processing program that prepped newly allocated file space by setting all the bytes to zero, one byte at a time.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
On any given day these are my top CPU hogging activities.
1.) Games
2.) M$ Apps
3.) Firewall Apps
So, I know what you mean. And I've even noticed the same thing when trying ootb installs of mandrake 7,8,9,10, redhat 6,7 etc. on my 1600 athlon xp.
Until I tried SuSE 9.1. I'm not a fan of kde but this distro looks really nice and it feels snappy in a way I've never known from linux in the half dozen or so commercial distros I've tried over the years. Between the snappy desktop, the eye candy and yast, it sets a REALLY high bar for every other desktop. You might give it a try and see if you don't agree.
And no, I don't work for novell...
Oh, now I remember. It's something for toy computers that don't use a filesystem that doesn't need need to be defragged.
Unrealistic.
1) People who like bright-shiny-and-animated-GUIs like that of XP have hard time setting a desktop background image. Imagine asking them decide between various desktop enhancements and selectively switching them on.
2) If it doesn't look pretty, it doesn't sell to the masses.
The owls are not what they seem
The steps apple introduced are some pretty good ideas. I wouldn't be suprised to see them start showing up in Linux and *BSD. Maybe even Windows in the next couple releases.
Evolution or ID?
You can load Knoppix entirely into RAM (if you have a lot of it, anyway)
vmlinuz toram
Rewrite it!
This holds especially for applications, but it definitely applies to operating systems as well. Most modern software is simply bloated beyond belief.
BeOS, by all accounts, is a full-fledged OS, and it takes a Pentium (not Pentium 4, but original Pentium) 15 seconds to boot it, including the GUI. What's up with Windows and OS X taking over a minute on hardware that is several times faster?! On Linux, you could at least skip most of the init stuff and boot in seconds (likely mostly pauses that you have to keep for faulty PC hardware).
Then there's the libraries. glibc is well over 5 megabytes. You are not going to convince me that isn't bloatware. If all that code doesn't eat CPU time, it at least eats memory, which could lead to more swapping. GTK is also typical - ever resize a GTKWindow? It's visibly slow! That doesn't happen to Windows 3.11 on my grandpa's 486! What is that code doing?!
Applications... Firefox is what? 10 megabytes installed size? And that's a light weight browser. What? We need 10 megabytes on top of libc, X, and GTK for parsing a simple markup language and rendering those widgets? Excuse me! Even lynx is hundreds of kilobytes, and it mostly just reads data from a socket, strips the tags, and spits it straight out. What the fsck? Say "OpenOffice.org" or Java and I'll explode.
All we have today is bloatware. I'm *really* tempted to roll my own OS and applications, and I am going to have a shot at it this summer.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I love you guys who talk of compilers and switches and say things like "hack the top level makefile" when you're supposedly talking to "noobs."
This is just one of the many reasons people:
a) stick with windows
b) buy a mac.
At least, that's what I heard on IRC. Oh, and use about a gram of silicone grease on the northbridge - that'll speed up your RAM.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
...apparently not as well as Apple. Gee, didn't see that coming.
Every revision of OS X has run (or at least "felt") faster than its predecessor did on the same hardware. Panther will run fine on a five year-old G4, assuming you've added RAM to what the machine shipped with in 1999.
You absolutely cannot say that about Windows. Nobody sane would even consider trying to run XP on a PC they bought new in 1999. One of Microsoft's growing problems is that people are getting off the upgrade treadmill-- they've begun to REFUSE to upgrade to version n+1 because they know their computer will feel slower than it does with version n.
I've got a 733MHz G4 running OS X 10.2.8, and a home built (with *quality* parts) Athlon XP 2600 system running XP, and there's no comparison... the XP box feels terribly slower, even heavily optimized with all the XP eye candy shit turned off, unneeded services disabled and spyware, etc ruthlessly prevented/exterminated. OS X running on a machine with 1/3 of the horsepower thoroughly embarasses it in terms of user-perceived speed. That's just plain pathetic.
I worked there for years, through the development of Win95 Osr2, Win98, Win98 SE, Win ME (but that one wasn't my fault), WIn 2k, Win XP and into the first little bit of Longhorn... Longhorn will be as slow as or slower than the current XP systems, even when properly configured. We don't call it "Bloatware" for nothing. One way to make it faster is to cut out all the crap. If someone wants to install Solitaire, FANTASTIC, let them choose to do so, but for crap sake, DON'T install it by default... Fix the File Tables, Fat32 was good, NTFS is better, they say the new schema for Longhorn will be better, if they can ever get it working... If a user wants the colors and blinking things, then let them set it that way...don't make that the default... Just because a processor can hit 3.2 GHz DOES NOT mean you have to use every Hz of speed... Just because Hard Disks are not in the hundreds of GB, does not mean you must fill it up with an OS... Just because memory is "cheep" and some systems can handle 2 gig or more, does not mean you must use the whole thing to manage your OS... The system requirements for Longhorn are rediculous at best...when Longhorn ships, Linux will finally get the break it needs!
--E--
This is technically offtopic, but often much of the 'slowness' we still experience on our computers which people often blame on their 'operating system' isn't really down to the operating system (i.e. kernel), but more the higher level stuff that runs on top of it. It seems that lots of efforts are going into making operating systems more efficient, since there's lots of interest in this area, but that efficiency is more than lost further up. (Not that I should be complaining, since I'm just another person not doing anything about it.)
Try running Windows NT on a new Intel system (say 2-3GHz) for example - it'll run blazingly fast, and with software versions from around the same time it'll still do much of what everyone wants to do - email, web, office, graphics manipulation - but really much faster - things will load practically instantly, rather than after five or ten seconds, and it's all still nice and graphical and everything, just like people want.
Many (but not all) XP machines I meet still seem to take 2-10 seconds even to do basic things such as open My Computer, Internet Explorer or a properties dialog, which one has to wonder is worth the wait for the extra functionality - basically lots of drivers, a couple of extra bundled programs and supported file formats, minor changes to the interface and the other couple of things I'll get flamed for forgetting. Microsoft have no doubt made some improvements to the kernel between releasing NT and releasing XP, but most still seem to be no faster to use, if not slower.
I maintained a school network up until last year which still ran NT and KDE2 on around 2/3 of systems, and then when my replacement went and wiped everything out and replaced it with new machines running XP (with an enormous cost to them), many staff told me that there were lots of things that didn't work any more, and there'd be frequent outages of the entire network.
On a Linux+X system, running X on its own (i.e. just the one program you want) or with a light window manager (fvwm or whatever) is again noticeably faster than running Gnome or KDE. Loading Mozilla or OpenOffice.org means loading the entire frameworks they run in, and often we're loading up a great deal of functionality we don't want in that particular situation. I think a good example is Dillo, a web browser written entirely in C that just does the basics (launches in around 0.7 seconds on this Athlon 700 system, compared to Mozilla, which takes around 5, and Mozilla Firefox, which isn't far off that) - it'd be interesting to see if they could add things like CSS or SSL support and still keep it fast.
on a dual Xeon with 1G Ram system, 90% of the services turned off, and compared to (blank)box or windowmaker or xfce, gnome/kde runs standing still.
And for the life of me I can't figure out if any those kernel schedule-related features developers like philosophize about once in a while, actually benefit the overall performance of the system.
Don't take my word for it -- take Ars Technica's review of Panther for example:
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I have a few SCSI drives, one 15k for system/apps one 10k for datafiles/swap and a giant cheap IDE drive for all my storage. My optical devices are SCSI and I can dupe a CD in less than 5 with no CPU usage. Alas, I could only find internal DVD burners with an IDE interface so my cool-factor takes a dip.
I'll never go back to IDE.
Blar.
Has anyone tried using a RAMdisk as their OS drive?
Many moons ago, it was possible to make a RAM disk on a Mac, install an OS on it, and (warm) boot from it. It would remain in memory and work perfectly as long as the computer wasn't shut down-- it could only be restarted. I tried it once or twice just to check it out, and the computer booted and ran like lightning compared to the normal hard drive boot.
One of the utility suites back then (Central Point Utilities?) even had a feature where the machine would boot from a RAM disk with the utils on it, to fix the occasional really serious Mac problem.
Booting from a RAM disk stopped being possible after Apple made a hardware change in newer Macs that had the side-effect of making the RAM non-persistent through warm-reboots (i.e., your RAM disk would go bye-bye). I forget exactly when it happened... perhaps after the first generation of Power Macs, when they went from using NuBus to using PCI?
Here's another interesting fact. The Macintosh Classic, released in 1990, had System 6.0.8 (IIRC) burned into its ROM-- you could boot it disklessly from the OS in ROM by holding down Command-Option-O-X at startup. Nobody really knows what that feature was intended for.
~Philly
Enough said.
On the other hand, my father doesn't see much speed improvement between a 450Mhz AMD, 64M Ram, running Windows 98, and a 1.2G AMD, 256M Ram running Windows 2000, but then again, as you get old time slows down.
Filesystem journaling does not make the filesystem faster, and it's silly to suggest that it does.
In fact, journaled filesystems are generally noticeably (one might say significantly) slower than non-journaled ones.
The only 'performance' gain one gets from journaling is after an unclean dismount (a crash or power outage). The system will boot up much quicker, but that's it.
Following in Microsofts footstep would produce dramatic results in speed. Quite simply all Apple needs to do is double the system requirements for every new release. This is much simpler and cheaper than tweaking the GUI.
I know this is an unpopular view (hence AC), but Windows XP is very fast for a lot of things.
:(
One of the reasons I dont use Linux as my desktop is the office packages. Under windows, I can type ctrl+alt+w (My shortcut for MS Word) and it starts INSTANTLY! Not 5 or 10 seconds, like OpenOffice. Call it bloated or whatever, but it works the way I like.
For example, run any program and look in %windir%\Prefetch - and try run it again and look at the speed difference.
There was a discussion about this on the kernel development mailing list a couple of months ago I think, and the approach used by windows was considered.
I also use Maya a lot, and other operating systems it has been ported to (I havent used IRIX) have problems
with various graphics cards and/or sound. OS X has worse performance than windows for the same price for running Maya as a workstation or a rendernode.
All the eyecandy and other crap is very easy to turn off... things work a lot better on a wider variety of hardware than any other OS. Linux has a lot of driver support, but nowhere near that of Windows still
Here's a "mini-HOWTO" that I found via google. I didn't read the whole thing, but it looks informative. Wikipedia's Ramdisk entry had links to two stripped down knoppix distros that could be loaded into a ramdisk - Damn Small Linux (50 mb), and Feather Linux (64 mb). I've never done anything with ramdisks (I'm a linux newbie, too) but they do sound pretty neat.
Then avoid bloated multi-library dependent C++ GUIs.
To me the ultimate example of this is Damnsmall Linux, nothing but lean and mean apps!
If a computer is 10x more powerful then it was 7 years ago it should be doing 10x the amount of work, instead we get more and more eye candy.
The story below this has the word "crash" in the title so my brain combined the two into a more interesting topic.
-prator
Do like IBM did with OS/2's big revision Warp. All the changes to Warp slowed performance down in general so IBM used smoke and mirrors. They worked on speeding up screen I/O as much as possible. End users raved about how fast Warp was. Looks faster, feels faster, but any program that required much prcessing was getting slower and slower. But joe user thought he had a speed deamon becasue the screen painted real fast.
1. turn on apple II series box.
2. Press Ctrl+break (? it's been a looong time since I used one).
3. You're done.
It takes under 2 seconds. Show me a "new" machine (see: desktop,server or notebook from the last 5 years) that actually boots that fast, please! (not just turns on the monitor)
stuff |
I just did a quick Googel search, and didn't find anything about doing this on OS X. Since, I can get 8 Gigs in there, I was wondering if anybody has information on using RAM disks with Apple stuff. Thanks.
Apple computers do not hibernate. Rather, when they "sleep", enough devices (in particular, the dynamic RAM) are kept alive (at the cost of some battery life, if the computer is running on battery power). Consequently, upon wakeup, the user perceives instant-on behavior: a very desirable effect.
I don't know how they can be proud of not hibernating. Windows can sleep OR hibernate. Although being a Mac household, hibernation is one reason I MIGHT consider windows for my next laptop. The ability to get back to all you have left around with your laptop hibernating for a few days unplugged and still have full battery power when you open it up is VERY nice.
So, you could get the same effect if you pre-load the caches when you boot. You should be able to dd if=xx of=/dev/null to load the data into cache if you can specifiy the data by disk location (faster) or cp -R xxx /dev/null if you have less memory and need to refer to specific files.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
In linux, one of the things that makes it seems really lethargic is the lack of operator feedback. With even recent MDK and RH installs I notice the mouse cursor is frequently just sitting there doing nothing at all while the machine thrashes away at a task. Last week I was mutzing around with DiskDrake - I told it to create a 160GB encrypted partition and mount it. After several seconds the cursor stopped animating and the window became completely non responsive. I knew it hadn't crashed it was just busy waiting for the process to end and if I let it go it would eventually come back. About five minutes later it returned, filled in the empty white box and reported the task complete.
This kind of behavior in windows means "the task is dead, ctrl-alt-del and see if you can end the task." In linux it may not mean that at all - it may just mean "wait a minute I'm not done." But in either case it lessens the user experience and, in some cases, is downright confusing. And in most every case it's extremely frustrating.
This is the sort of thing I was talking about with suse. I'm not sure what switches were set where, but I've never seen the busy cursor lose its animation nor have I seen a busy window just quit responding. Even when the task takes a few minutes it remains well behaved on the desktop. This is the sort of polish that makes a computer feel "professional" and even "fast" - it doesn't have to get done this very second, but "at least act rational while you're doing it."
I found when I import a photo from scanner, if I switch to other application, there's NO PROGRESS at all.
On XP, the same Mathematica benchmark seems to be 20% faster than on 2K - same hardware, services, drivers.
So, since they defragment-on-the-fly and do hot-file-clustering, then to slow Mac down, write code that is 21 MB in size, and make it critical to a wave of resources so the file is always being accessed. It will not be defragmented nor optimally grouped.
Are you listening, Bill?
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
device=himem.sys
device=emm386.exe noems
files=40
buffers=10
smartdrv c+ 10000
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Whenever you install new software, you have to wait while the system "optimizes" it, which in fact means checking for applications that need their prebinding redone. On a 700MHz imac - less than 2 years old - this sometimes takes 15 minutes or more. Since I bought it, I've wasted hours, if not days, waiting for installations to complete because of this, which is far longer (and more frustrating) than the total time saved starting programs.
I don't understand why it doesn't just leave the prebinding to be done the first time the program is run.
That is if you were still running Win 3.1 on a P133 and not Windows 95. A 486 with 8MB ran Win 3.1 fine as well. In fact Windows 95 with say a P100 and 16MB ram ran quite well also. I used to run 95 on a P60 with 8MB of ram. The only time it seemed slow was when I ran Mechwarrior. Once I upgraded to 16MB things went really well. Those running P133's in that timeframe were certainly not complaing of slowness since the P133 was the hottest thing going.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
One thing I just remembered that annoys me about the Linux dists that I have used, is that all the startup scripts are executed in sequence, even if they aren't dependent on one another. On my Amiga, I remember I used to have the startup script execute all sorts of things asyncronously in parallel, so that the CPU never idled while waiting on disk.
Maybe Unix-like OSes should do that. I mean, there's no reason /etc/init.d/postfix and /etc/init.d/apache can't run at the same time, so that if one of 'em blocks on some I/O (disk or network or whatever) then the CPU(s) can work on the other one. That would ultimately result in a faster boot.
Sure, there are some dependencies (I guess you want network interfaces started up before servers start binding to ports, for example) but there are ways of dealing with that. Hm.. maybe there's already a tool that sort of handles the complexity of dependencies and can execute things in parallel when appropriate: make. Hmm... Anyone already doing this?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I personally think Apple's hardware optimization (made easy since it only has two chipsets--Nvidia and ATI) aka "Quartz Extreme" is stellar. Whenever I move over to my Linux workstation I'm always a little jolted because even though it (Linux) is running on a much new, faster, more powerful computer AND graphics card, general GUI response from things like dragging & expanding windows is surprisingly sluggish. Same applies, to a lesser extent, with Windows.
But seriously, my old 500 Mhz PowerMac seems much more responsive than my new fancy Athlon 64 3200+ machine.
Murray Todd Williams
For those who quibble about the word immediately, I mean faster than I can say "1" as if I'm counting. Before the upgrade, Word took 4-5 seconds to open, Excel could take as long as 15 seconds to put away all my files - which it did even while I was using them just in case it crashed which meant the machine would simply go away at random times while Excel backstopped itself. Excel still backstops itself but now it's so fast I don't notice it.
The Raptor is definitely worth it if you want snappy response while running Windows 2000.
Add RAM -- Works for me everytime.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Seriously. I have mandrake 9.2 installed on my computer. Unfortunately, my computer is a Pentium II, 266. Because of this, it spares me the fancy graphical boot and shutdown screens automatically. I'm sure there's a couple other enhancements it does to run on my slow computer. It runs very quickly I find for such a slow computer. Only things that don't run quickly are those that require tons of processing power.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.
What fucking hoops?
Right-click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings button.
Choose either "Best Performance" or "Best Appearance." Or check each option individually. What a non-issue.
If this was KDE, someone would have already answered with this, but because it's Windows, everyone just nods with the rest of the flock, "Baa, baa, yes, there are hoops to jump through, baa."
Speaking of KDE, talk about fucking hoops. You've got a completely horrible control center, with three different areas for changing the looks of things like window styles, widget styles, and so on. Why the hell isn't that all integrated into one configuration dialog? Oh, I forgot, ease-of-use is a criticism we only reserve for non-issues on the Windows platform like checking a radio button to get rid of a blue theme.
"Sufferin' succotash."
OS X doesn't date back to the mid-eighties. OS X is based on NextStep technology Steve Jobs brought with him when he returned to Apple.
They had been trying to replace the classic MacOS since the mid-eighties, but they weren't working on OS X then. They had been trying to get a new OS off the ground for years and failed every time--until Jobs brought in NextStep. That's when they started on OS X, and the first release was in 1999 as OS X Server.
Yes, OS X is based on a Mach kernel with BSD subsystems grafted in. It's basically the UNIX GUI that server-oriented Linux is always trying to be but will never achieve even 10% of.
"Sufferin' succotash."
and I bet it could work for Microsoft
That IS Microsoft's patented business model. You now owe Bill $699 for infringment.
--
What would Bill Clinton do?
Question: How does FreeBSD compare?
As far as I know, Windows derives most of its speed from having display drivers live in kernel space. NVidia's XFree86 driver actually uses a kernel module, so in theory the two architectures should be roughly equal; is XFree86's internal architecture that bad compared to Windows and GDI?
FreeBSD's kernel is, according to its adherents, faster than Linux. Apparently it had an O(1) scheduler long before Linux. How well does XFree86 run on FreeBSD?
* A vague claim that they aren't better engineered ("completely false") because they aren't cross-platform. Yes, lets stick to absolutists definitions, because surely nothing could be well-engineered yet exist for only one platform. You know, like OS X for instance?
* A vague claim that IE has less code just because it's not as HTML-compliant. Lame and amusing.
* Describing how Microsoft analyzes I/O and optimizes accordingly. Doesn't that mean they're better engineers? I don't see how it's a criticism that Windows optimizes apps correctly to minimize I/O--you just gave them a compliment.
* A vague claim that Microsoft builds in "basis" that other applications "can't benefit from." Of course, nothing is mentioned or specified, just like when people claim Windows XP is "riddled with spyware" without citing a single example other than Windows Media Player grabbing song titles like every single other media player.
Just another collection of vague, unproven claims in your typical Thursday story on Slashdot.
"Sufferin' succotash."
These are the secrets of the Linux desktop. You don't know about these things when you see the pretty desktop art on the back of the Mandrake box. All you get told is when you go to some niche site like Slashdot, and someone mentions something called "pre-linking" and asks you which distro you're using. Hell, Office on Windows doesn't even preload itself into memory (yet another False Meme(tm) spread on Slashdot as if it's proven truth--but it doesn't matter if I point this out, the rabid zealots aren't interested in truth and will continue to spread the lie) and it loads in three seconds for me, compared to OpenOffice which takes 10.
Didn't you know you're supposed to ignore how much mysteriously slower apps take to load under Linux desktop emulators like KDE and GNOME? You're just supposed to go off and spend three hours hacking at text files to get a sound card working and ignore performance issues (and go rattling on about how Windows XP is "riddled with spyware" without ever citing a single example). Didn't you know taskbars and start menus and integrated filesystem/HTML browsers are the norm in KDE, while Microsoft is supposed to be the uncreative one ripping people off?
And people wonder why Linux is still at an embarrassing 1% on Google Zeitgeist. What was that about the Linux desktop taking over OS X usage? What a hilarious article that was when Slashdot posted it. The power of all the volunteers in the world, and we make a clone of UNIX. Then we make a clone of Windows 98 on top of it.
"Sufferin' succotash."
What on earth possessed you to write that I was wrong, and then confirm my statement is correct in the second sentence you write?
Wow. Just wow.
Or do you think NeXT was started in the seventies or nineties?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There are two kinds of speed: things that are fast and things that feel fast.
The article and the comments here on /. are mainly talking about true benchmarkable speed. Things that are fast.
But some apps don't really need to be fast. They just have to feel fast. This holds true for most interactive applications. It's all about psycholigy with this one.
Ever wondered why Windows Explorer builds up its icons from the right bottom to the top left? Doesn't matter in real speed, but it just feels faster. Your brain just isn't used to this flow: usually you read from the top left to the bottom right, or you read from the top right to the bottom left. Your eyes immediately focus on the spot your brain expects the icons to appear. But instead the appear in the opposite corner. By the time your brain figures out it has been tricked, the window is already full of icons.
More tricks: ever wondered why windows wastes memory by trying to have some free memory ready all the time? It makes starting new apps faster. But on average the system is slower.
In the Unix world there is only raw, benchmarkable speed. And that's why KDE and Gnome are slow. They aren't slow, they just feel slow.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
"Recompile it on every PC" isn't on this list for a reason.
This discussion is pedantic.
Sure - speed is good,
But the speed of application is simply this - they must be fast enough to be tolerable - no faster.
customers are not going to choose a product which makes drastic speed enhancements at the expense of features - provided those features can be run at reasonable speeds on available hardware.
Rather - there are features out their waiting for hardware speeds to see the limelight.
Voice recognition is often touted as waiting for higher CPU speeds.
So is Live renderings - (when you watch a movie by rendering each frame in real time from the actor and motion files alone.)
Add to this teleconferencing, cryptography, etc
selling software amounts to a compromise of features to speed - and the right compromise is as close to the edge as you can get away with.
The guy with a two feature database that runs like bloody hell is not going to beat Access - even if it is occassionaly slower.
AIK
I agree. I've been using linux for years now and although the apps and WMs (I use kde) have improved drastically, I find everything to be quite sluggish. I used to dual boot with win2k pro, and everything just seemed to run faster there. Not just the load times as you mentioned, but difference in the GUI responsiveness was VERY noticable. Firefox started much faster (v0.8), and moving opened windows around on my desktop just doesnt have that sluggish "drag". I don't know if it's the problem with X, because it's not just KDE where I see this. Same thing even when I use fluxbox.
I'm using PIII 384MB ram, ATI xpert rage128 (16mb) graphics card, ReiserFS, Debian Unstable.
my blog
I thought you were kidding about those prices. Holy damn, that's an expensive disk.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Easiet way to improve "snappiness":
nice -n -10 X
Easy and yes.. it really works. Try it today!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Near as I can tell, everything past Word 5.1a has gone in exactly the opposite direction, and even that old 1993-or-so Word wasn't faster than what came before -- it was just reasonably lean and built for what it needed to do. You may be right, but the assertion's not falsifiable. ;-)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The number one thing they should do IMHO is reduce overhead.
What exactly is "overhead"? It just sounds like a vague claim that the system is "inefficient" and needs to be "optimized".
One advantage of XP over 2000 is that on XP you can disable the page file entirely, and Windows won't keep suggesting you enable it and/or complain because it's out of page file space (as happens if you set a 2 MB page file in 2000).
My 1.6 Ghz/1 GB/80 GB laptop with XP with no pagefile is much more "responsive" than my
1.6 Ghz/1 GB/80 GB desktop running 2000 with a pagefile. Windows seems to page memory to disk whether it's necessary or not; it will page out Thunderbird to disk, for example, just because it isn't the front-most application -- yet I have more than enough free RAM (let's say 256 in use, the rest used for buffers), the amount it saves by doing so is minimal at best. And I know you can set Thunderbird/Mozilla to stop Windows from paging it to disk, but should I have to do that for every app I want to use?
If OS's were really faster they'd require LESS processing power and LESS memory. If only OSX would boot up on my G4 the way OS9 did on my G4....If only XP booted up as fast on my P4 as Win2K did on my P3.... :(
It doesn't really matter to me how you explain why an OS is "faster" if when I upgrade to it, I have to upgrade my hardware to "see" the speed increase...
Ave Molech Setting
I've heard the expression before but I don't know which way this guy is using it.
I had a 386 16Mhz with Win 3.11 installed but the harddrive controller crapped out so I tried sticking it in my 700Mhz system. It booted up just fine. The sound card was too new to be usable. The boot time wasn't really improved but that was probably because I was using the 120MB drive. But once it was booted it ran great.
I read somewhere that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade won't run on newer harddrive. That's bunk. It just won't run on newer OSes. I played it a bit on Win 3.11 on the 700Mhz Duron.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Yep, would have to be an air-conditioned closet (luckily, I have one on the other side of the wall, so a small cutout, and I'd have the necessary access.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The reason:
EXT3
The difference between EXT2 and EXT3 is the difference between being faster than windows and slower than windows.
Incidentally, NTFS is considerably slower than FAT for some tasks; it would seem that the journalling of both NTFS and EXT3 is to blame for their slow performance.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
for a real lean install, take a look at this! http://www.litepc.com/products.html
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Love,
Overly Critical Guy
Hey douchebag, what happened to your other troll account bonch? Have you been modded into the ground so much that you think you'll do better with this account?
Here's a clue for you: We (meaning Slashdotters) are on to you and your games. You will *never* have excellent karma again.
FASTS? Operating systems are FASTS???
My tv is fast, my player or car are also fast, just press the ON button and voila it WORKS!.
I just don't understand why after 30 years of technology I still have to wait MINUTES for a computer to simply go on. Computer and software design was frozen 30 years back, it's a shame.
What's in a sig?
What's in a sig?
amit is an idiot. he has a successful stream of totally moronic articles. thanks.
RAM is cheaper than programmer time. Particularly since the developers don't have to buy the RAM...
Sad, but true. Though, there really is no excuse for for the iTouch problem, then again there is no reason to spend 6 months trying to fit a word processor into 640K (like they had to in the "old days" my prof likes to talk about so much.) There really must be a happy medium, and I think most apps and OS's are at it.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Uh, no it's not. What would you change in Display properties? What would you change in Folder properties? Nice specifics there, pal.
The only one I could agree with you on is the Start menu. Oh, what a hassle. Right-clicking, going to Properties, and changing the radio button from one to the other. The horror!
"Sufferin' succotash."
think more dos 5.0+ days.
:/ :sigh:
those where the good ol days of setting up menu's in your config.sys file...
You'll need a II,II+ or IIe for this.
Remove the floppy drive card.
Now turn it on. No need to press ctrl-break. It boots up in under 100ms.
I went to the WWDC last year, and the apple coders claimed panther gained a 15% speed increase across the board when they recompiled all the code using gcc 3.x instead of gcc 2.9.x.
so far that I've used is QNX. It will compile most any linux/bsd program out there. People dont' seem to like it because it's proprietary, but some of it is open, and you can download and use it all you want for free. It is fast/clean/simple and stable. It will run great on old or top of the line hardware. I bet if they open sourced their radeon driver (very plausable if we beg them enough), someone could get dual head to work for us too without having two video cards, then we could use the driver in Linux/BSD. I think QNX deserves more attention.
Sig: I stole this sig.
maybe, but i spent a lot more time watching my computer crash when it was running os 9. this seemed to be an extension of the behaviour i saw back around system 7 / PPC, when if you clicked too fast the system would bomb. awesome.
i get an overall speed increase from a system i don't need to reboot every hour and a half, that i can trust to stay up while i walk away for a while.
os 9 was snappy. snappy loading, snappy processing audio, snappy crashing without recovery at the worst possible times. os 9 sucked ass, and i'm glad i don't need to use it any more.
What would you change in Folder properties? Nice specifics there, pal.
Speaking as someone who had to login in to XP computers at school constantly, that would not save settings between logins, there's quite a bit that annoyed me (I'm a steadfast 2000 user, and tweak it to look as much like 98 as possible).
Problems with folders:
- that damn preview pane that takes up all kinds of space, and slows things to a crawl when you've had the window open in many directories over a period of time.
- use multiple windows is the default for folders
- do not show extensions by default (had a lot of students break their submitted assignments because of this). Not to mention show system files and hidden files.
- icon view by default. I can think of very few cases where the detailed list is not the most useful view
- I like to sort my mp3s by date when looking for the newest ones to put on my mp3 player. XP by default shows the ID3 information, and no date.
And that's just off the top of my head. You can argue that Gnome/KDE do similar things, but the preview pane and ID3 thing specifically DO have a large performance hit on large directories. And doesn't the icon view try and make icons of all graphic files by default as well? *shudder*
Create an IE-free installation CD
Allow the user to do things through a standards-adherent command line instead of the bloated, oversimplfied, and slow Finder.
try this on 10.2.8 on a G5 (not sure of other 10.2.x but probably still happens-- does not happen on 10.3.x):
open a small window and place it in the area of 640x480
moce the windows as fast as you can but have it least 1 pixel in the 640x480 space
now move it out of that range and notice that the movement is no longer smooth!
for bigger windows this isnt a problem as 1 pixel inside the 640x480 area is more than likly.
OS X 10.x sucks ass even on a dual G5 i've said it before many times MY 1.2 ATHLON KICKS BEATS ANY G5 in basic user interface responce, file system responce, loading applications and just about everything else most normal people do every day!
Task manager shows you working set size. The working set will be trimmed when you minimize the app or call SetProcessWorkingSetSize() to trim it yourself manually (thats what the OS does when you minimize something). Additionally if the system needs the memory it will decrease the working set as necessary. So that isn't necessarily memory usage per se, you could think of it as iTouch 'touched' 15MB of memory (whether it involved DLLs being loaded, runtime engines such as Java or .NET bootstrapping, and accessing large resources). Apps that are skinned (such as Trillian) usually have a much higher working set size than normal, this is part of the reason (and don't get me started on Trillian's quality).
This is what I understand, someone may know more...please correct me if I am wrong somewhere.
Maybe you were being facetious, but there is no way you saved 10GB by getting rid of extra languages. Maybe 1GB, but not 10. And the receipts left by a default install of OS X weigh in at less than 100MB.
The CPU wastes billions of CPU cycles -- doesn't mean "uses tons of CPU cycles". If I click on a program that isn't in cache, the CPU wastes tons of cycles unless you have it constantly running background programs. This usually isn't the case on a system designed for interactive user-use.
Anyone with a partial clue has been told to turn off as many as possible, or all background applications to speed up performance. So if there are no background applications, just how is the CPU *NOT* wasting time waiting on a READ? Writes are virtually free because of DMA while your program continues on, but READ's -- ya just gotta stop and wait.
As for the answer "just" being a faster HARD DISK -- will admit a 15K HD will feel nice for almost anyone, but the biggest delay these days -- internet latency. Bandwidth is continuing to be expanded, I just recently got mine upped by about 3x down/.75up at the cost of doubling the 10ms latency I had to the nearest router.
It isn't just internet delays -- but worse the latency in a connection to open and return info from a READ. Was just reading a slashdotted article on ARS.Technica...a standard template of the page was returned in under a second, but to display the article content took an additional 30-45 seconds.
The more widgets, the more time to fetch them. Certainly you can re-use a an HTTP connection sometimes, but then you're only getting 'serial' fetch performance.
It seems as more apps work with the network, the single app with worst latency is going to be web browswers.
While there is new HTML standards to allow for prefetch of data after the first read, it's seems it's rarely used. On some occasions, I've gotten noticably less frustrated spidering a site while fetching a cup of coffee, and then reviewing the site in my webcache that waiting 30-45 seconds between each page I want to read. Ug!
-l
A pragmatic decision to keep the OS PC aware. Apple has to keep this OS multiplatform aware-never put all your eggs in one basket, especially if you are Apple.
Lots of comments on Apple vs. XP, but with Apple using a Unix core, I was slightly more interested on how it used run time tracing in background and tries to record caching signatures for apps and "fastlinks" for common libraries. Also boot and init.d tracing and moving all the startup programs into the same area of the disk (maybe near the beginning of a partition where read times are usually faster). Wouldn't have to pre-load a cache but having startup programs intelligently laid out would seem to help boot time. Using page-in behavior of programs traced in background to determine pre-fetch
strategies might help program startup times. I dunno if Gnu libs/gcc use common lib[c,etc] addr's to speed runtime linkage. Anyone know??
-l
PC stands for Program Counter. Look it up in your computer architecture book. Nothing to do with crossplatform compatibility.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Fancy features are fine for people with a few gigahertz and plenty of RAM to spare. The default "look & feel" of a system should not be fancy; it should be as simple as possible. A user should be able to turn on all of these fancy features but they should be turned off by default. In my experience the average user doesn't care too much whether or not their task bar is blue or their boot screen has a pretty GUI; they just want good performance.
Here:
r ar y/l-boot.html
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/lib
Used make, just like you said.
Eric Hensema says that Microsoft designed icon appearance to fool you into thinking that Windows is faster than it actually is. So they spent expensive programmer/designer time that could have been used to actually make Windows faster on psychological tricks. This is an outrage.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
...just reinstall 98 every 3 weeks. Speed's no problem here!
Maybe on windows, but I don't seem to have a cache file other than the web page one. And closing a single opera window takes a noticable amount of time (especially if opera has been running for a few days). Unlike a real exit this is actually irritating, rather than just curious.
Closing a single pane within a window is fast.
So, I suspect it is a feature of the GUI toolkit they are using wanting to sign off nicely on each resource, and soe kind of caching which means a window which has been around a while is holding on to lots of resources it never uses (and so which get paged out to disk).
Or maybe it's a plot to dissuade me from exiting opera ever.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Oh dear. "Linux desktop emulators" eh? You sound like a well-informed individual...
Windows spyware? It's not about what spyware Windows comes with, it what it's prone to. I've spent more hours than should be tolerable cleaning out adware, spyware and viruses from Windows boxes, all because of insanely stupid design decisions (big open RPC port for the whole world to see? Sheesh).
As for the desktop share issue, once again you're not the sharpest tool in the box. That was about CORPORATE usage -- not little home Pee Cees. And your average business desktop user doesn't spend all of his/her day browsing Google.
Sigh, what a laughably incompetent post. Still, this reply is for anyone who might think there's some kernel of sense in your weak and clumsy arguments.
[Windows 3.1] ran fine on my 486/25 back in the day. How much RAM did you have? I'm pretty sure I only had 32 or 64.
Windows 3.1 could only use 16MB RAM. More RAM would be wasted for Windows 3.1, and I do not remember any MSDOS applications that would use 16MB even with Extended Memory. That caused a major price jump at 16MB. Most systems had 4 slots filled with 4MB chips. You could put in 8MB chips, but they were not cost efficient, and buying 16MB or higher chips was for the wealthy. I think we were using RAM technology that required pairs of chips at that time.
The release of Windows 95 caused major changes in the memory market:
- 4MB was required,
- 16MB was the minumum for a decent system, and
- 64MB became the norm as soon as the prices dropped.
That said, virtual memory in Windows98SE has problems if the PC over 512MB physical RAM. MS prefers forcing OS upgrades by not supporting hardware that does not exist at the time of release:
- Win98 FDISK and Scandisk cannot handle hard drives larger than 64GB. (There is a replacement for FDISK, but you need a working Windows98 PC to install it.)
- Win2K requires patching to allow using hard drive space over 130GB.
I wonder if/how [Windows 3.1] would run on a modern system
It would only use 16MB RAM. It would be really fast. The interface would be worse than WinXP. You could play Solitaire. MSWord could not read modern DOC files, and modern versions of MSWord trash the layout of your files. Were there any other programs for Win3.1? Most games required exiting to MSDOS.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I'm not exactly sure how this stuff works, someone mentioned something about the libraries, such as glibc, GTk, ect... How often does these things get updated, or are they just expanded upon. If so, we've been expanding on something that was created eons ago. Maybe a rewrite of these, the building blocks of all the rest of the software we write, could help?
Just my 2c...
And who modded you as insightful?
Upgrading from 98 to 2K/XP is like going from MacOS 9.x to OSX. There are big changes going under the hoods. In fact, the changes were bigger in the Mac side.
The differences between 2K and XP are almost entirely in the UI. There are no real big changes going under the hoods, only fisher-price interface "improvements".
I really would like that XP never happened.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.