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:I love OS X

[kc0re]

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

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.