10 Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster

bariswheel writes "This kernelthread article seeks to investigate further to the inner core of OS X and the improvements therein. The subtopics are the following: BootCache, Kernel Extensions Cache, Hot File Clustering, Working Set Detection, On-the-fly Defragmentation, Prebinding, Helping Developers Create Code Faster, Helping Developers Create Faster Code, Journaling in HFS Plus, and Instant-on."

Comments

Obvious Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

The website even has a link to the old slashdot story: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/06/03 /130214.shtml

Pointless Effects

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple is going to bother optimizing other stuff on the OS, they should at least give you a way to turn off some of the extras when it comes to the GUI.

I don't need high resoution icons, drop shadows, dragging window effects, minimize effects...etc. In windows land, you can turn most of these eyecandy effects off and performance is greatly improved. You'd think that Apple would have considered this when releasing a computer with 256mb of ram on the base model (G4 mac mini). I love the computer, but it is SLOW.

Re:Pointless Effects

[ioErr]

I don't need high resoution icons

Those you can turn off. Just set the Finder to use 32x32 pixel icons. icns resources generally contain several versions of an icon, 128x128, 48x48, 32x32, and 16x16 pixels. If you use one of the small versions then the system won't waste time scaling the icon, or memory holding a big bitmap. I doubt you'll see much gain though.

But it's not in Apple's interest to let you turn off too much of the eye-candy. They want Mac OS to have its distinct look, and they are are in the business of trying to sell you newer hardware.

Re:Pointless Effects

[St. Arbirix]

In Windows land, the desktop eye-candy isn't hardware accelerated. Turning off a lot of the OSX eye-candy would only serve to idle the graphics hardware rather than making the computer respond any faster.

Hopefully, Microsoft's Aero will prove this point.

Re:Pointless Effects

[pohl]

those GUI 'extras' are not what is making a 256MB G4 slow. Rather, it would be the fact that the machine is going to be constantly swapping out to disk. Get more RAM.

Re:Pointless Effects

[pohl]

Not knowing much about you, the only thing that comes to mind is to stop externalizing blame. I don't have much to go on here, though.

Re:Dupe several years later?

[bondsbw]

Parent is flamebait? Come on, now... 'rg3' should probably be hired as a Slashdot admin to keep up with such things.

I'm quite impressed he or she can remember so far back. The current posters often miss dupes within the same day.

Re:I love OS X

[kc0re]

Um.. ANYTHING installed over Windows ME is an improvement. Hell, Going backwards would be an improvement.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

[Runefox]

You don't have to be a "GNU/Hippie" to use Linux, and there are plenty of reasons to do so, as well, not the least of which is that it's free and it'll run on that old P166 you bought over a decade ago. The "GNU/Hippies" you speak of are largely the guys who spend all day tweaking this and that to make sure the next release of your operating system is secure, productive, and pleasing to the eye, which you might notice Linux is becoming more and more, especially with user-oriented flavours like Ubuntu. The main difference is, the guys at Apple get paid for what they do, and the guys who contribute to Gnome do not. As such, Apple is a little further ahead, especially since their UI is more closely integrated into the core of the OS than Linux' is (and they don't have to contend with different flavours of hardware). Anyway, in closing, flamebait.

Re:I love OS X

[Kenshin]

I installed Windows ME when it came out.

It came off my machine after a month, and I went back to Win98 SE.

Yes, it WAS that bad.

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

[shmlco]

"But they threw out the baby with the bathwater when they ditched MacOS."

As long as you're waxing rhapsodic about that OS "written from the ground up in the early 80s to be graphical", you might also remember that it was also written from the ground up to be B&W, single-threaded, single-tasking, use fixed-size memory spaces, and totally without any form of internal or user-based security.

Any of those things that were added on later were major hacks to the system. Some, like the non-preemptive MultiFinder (switcher) were ingenious hacks, but hacks nontheless. Or are you saying a modern OS should swap out hundreds of shared low-level global variables on every context switch?

Or that, since you mentioned HLOCK, why a modern OS should have a handle-based non-protected fixed-patition-sized memory system, itself probably responsible for half the memory allocation/corruption bugs and crashes in any given Mac application. Or why a program needs me to allocate more memory to it when there's a half-gig free?

Or perhaps you can explain just why the system resource and process-slicing allocation kernal of a modern OS needs to be "graphical" from the ground up? Or conversely, why graphics, networking, file management, and other subsystems should not be layered on top of a rock-solid base?

I mean, if you really take the time to actually think about it, you might find that the "good old days" are in fact nothing but a fond, hazy memory... and far removed from the truth.