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."

Comments

Reduce Bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Faster?

[KoriaDesevis]

XP is CRAZY slower than 2k.

XP is faster to come up to the desktop. However, it is still busy accessing the hard drive and loading stuff in the background. You still have to wait for the OS to quit loading itself before you can use anything. Microsoft's claim that XP is faster than 2K was based on the time to desktop, apparently not time to usability.

Once loaded, XP has an annoying habit of wanting to refresh the desktop from time to time. That slows things down even more.

Um, speaking of Mac OS, that's not true for it

[ianscot]

People have said this before, but maybe you didn't catch it: Successive releases of OS X have actually been noticably faster, even on older machines.

Don't take my word for it -- take Ars Technica's review of Panther for example:

Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.