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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."
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
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.
Same thing with XP... I get a much better performance if I shut off all the fancy transparency effects. Sure, they look cool.. but are they really necessary?
OS designers shoudl also cut down with bloatware and trying to 'integrate' everything into the OS...
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. --
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.
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"
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.
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.
I'll simplify the comparison quiter a bit, but I think Apple decided to trade speed for distinguishing features. It must've worked, because people noticed.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
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.
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.
Application memory space during runtime? 15MB.
I remember when Borland spend a lot of effort to optimize their Quattro Pro spreadsheet so that it was monitoring it's own memory usage down to 512 byte increments. It would start discarding portions of itself that it no longer needed.
Those days are over, for sure.
"Sure, they look cool.. but are they really necessary?"
Ugh I hate this question. "Is it really necessary?"... is the type of question you can ask if you really want to make anything go away. "Is a >500mhz processor really necessary? Is a color monitor really necessary? Is being connected to the net 24/7 really necessary? Is a color printer really necessary when B&W is cheaper?" Who really cares so long as you can choose?
I'll answer your question, though: The more your UI gives you, the better reflexes you can build while using your machine. Have you ever reacted to a screen refresh? (Particularly in the olden days when the CPU had to fight harder...) Ever notice change in window focus simply by spotting the change in titlebar color? Etc.
I have no problem with people turning the fancy stuff off to boost performance, but the "is it really necessary" argument does not apply. The question is really "Do I want it?"
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 |
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.
I'm surprised by how much people are ignoring this. Every single time Apple releases a new version of MacOS X they cut out a bunch of Aqua special effects. The most notable thing was when they took the striping away from the dock, which made that critical UI element pop up much faster. These aren't really optimizations so much as "taking away features to make it go faster."
For a comparison you can run X with fvwm in (not in rootless mode) on MacOS X and see the difference. Or turn on terminal transparency and wiggle the terminal and watch the whole computer slow to a crawl.
That is the real reason OS X seems to go faster on slower computers with each release. On faster computers, I forget what it's called, but they pipe Aqua through the video card to take away the overhead, which is a major optimization. I don't think, by comparison, that any of the other effects they mention in the article count for much in terms of between-release improvements.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
I've used both it and 2K on several machines, and XP boots up ~30 seconds faster
Microsoft tends to spend more time figuring out ways to trick their users into *thinking* that things are faster even though it's actually taking as long, if not longer than previous versions. In this case, you've been tricked. Microsoft moved more stuff after the user is logged on. In other words, your system is still doing all of the things it used to do, plus probably more, it's just that you think it's done.
This is the difference between reality and perception. Microsoft tries very hard to address a user's perception, even at the cost of making reality slower. As is, in the above cited example, Microsoft gave you a login screen, whereby, you can do very little to nothing, but you're satisified thinking it's done, in spite of the fact (reality) that it's not. This means, attempting to do things right after the login screen will more than likely, take much longer than expected. They further hide this fact by making application startup and caching part of the OS boot sequence. Non-cached application startup, following initial login, will more than likely be painfully slow for non-trvial applications, at least until XP actually finishes it's startup.
Good or bad, you decide.
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.
Apple removed striping from everywhere in Panther. Quite a bit of it was replaced by brushed-metal. Even so, all it is doing is replacing one bitmap with another. The only possible gain is if they do not need to use alpha for transparency. Yet not all of this is by "removing" stuff. Quite a bit of tweaking is being done to speed up the OS, the most recent software update resulted in quite a few reports of faster system operation, and there was no discernable change in the featureset or operation of the UI.
The reason X runs slowly compared to Aqua is that Apple optimizes Aqua and allows harware acceleration (Quartz Extreme) and offloads lots of tasks to the GPU. I know of no X windowing system (aside from Apple's own implementation) that does this in OS X.
10.0 and 10.1 were dog-slow. Especially when you had a couple of hundred files in a folder. Jaguar was a huge increase in speed and performance. Quite a bit of that was due to the Quartz Extreme, but even my lowly 500MHz dual-USB iBook saw quite a boost from Jaguar and it was not able to use QE at all. Panther did very little to the iBook, except make it take forever to boot. I need to check on that bootcache issue.
My dual 800MHz Quicksilver is now almost three years old and I am still very happy with its performance. I expected to be wanting to replace it after two years, or after clock speeds have doubled, which is what I did when I used Wintel systems. Instead, I am considering keeping it around for the 10.4 release and at least another year or two. I attribute quite a bit of this to Apple's tweaks and performance enhancements of the OS.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Eh.. I'd argue differently.
IMHO, the next major revolution in OS design (and performance) will be from an exokernel architecture. For those who aren't familiar with them, it's a completely radical and different approach to kernel design, the main idea behind it is seperate protection from management. If you really think about it, who (I use that term loosely) would know better what resources, scheduling, etc an application will need - the kernel, or the application itself.
Traditional kernel design techniques give the (pretty much) the entire management of resources to the kernel itself and hide it behind a HAL (hardware abstraction layer), allowing the application little to zero say in the matter. Exokernels throw that idea out of the window, taking a completely opposite view on the issue. Once you give the power to the application, it opens a whole new world of OS design.
It's really quite interesting, for more information on different kernel designs you can check out the Microkernel entry at thefreedictionary.com
# fuser -v
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