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10 Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the road-to-betterment dept.

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."

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  1. 20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do by phozz+bare · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Well, not exactly, but here is the list of gripes and complaints I've accumulated over six months of using a Mac Mini (G4 1.2Ghz, 512MB RAM) as my primary machine for the last 10 months or so. I live in Israel and need Hebrew for daily work, so some complaints are specific to that.

    OS and GUI
    * Mouse cursor moves sluggishly. Requires purchased software (USB Overdrive) to make it move as expected, i.e. speed of cursor is proportional to the speed at which I move the mouse.
    * SMB can't network share anything but user directory (what about mounted disk images, CD's, single folders?)
    * Can't FTP share anything but a complete user directory. Gives remote user far too many privileges (user can switch to root directory, other user directories, etc).
    * GUI: Red "close" button has inconsistent behavior: hide (Mail)/close (Safari)/quit app (iPhoto).
    * GUI: Configuration menus are inconsistent. Some are "ok/cancel" like Windows, others are "change anything and it changes immediately, no second chances".
    * If "Show Item Info" is selected for the Desktop view, the volume icons only update their free space at restart (or when Finder crashes).
    * Data CDs burned in Finder with MP3 files will not play well in the car MP3 player. The car player will take over a minute mounting the disc and is slower at changing tracks. I have no idea why this occurs, but I'm burning my CDs on the PC.
    * Hebrew file names don't work well and are not always compatible with Windows file naming. Downloaded files may or may not have garbled names. In SMB shares, Windows sees Hebrew names as garbage.
    * Finder pollutes write-enabled SMB shares it accesses with garbage files like .DS_Store and perhaps others. I don't want these files on my Windows machine!
    * Finder: No right-click > open command prompt here (well, neither does Windows, but easy to add with a Powertoy).
    * Finder: Can't easily know the size of the contents of a directory (without "get info"), or the total size of more than one selected item (even "get info" doesn't help there). Windows Explorer is superior here.
    * 90-degree screen rotation is supported as a display option but is horribly slow and effectively unusable.
    * Inconsistent installation of applications. Some are dragged to the apps folder, others have an installer. Many things added with an installer have no uninstaller anywhere, so you're stuck with them (how do I cleanly get rid of X11? and XCode? Without using the command prompt?). Also, when removing an application it is difficult to remove its traces (in the Library folder and others).
    * There is no easy way to categorize applications. Everything is bundled up together in the "Applications" folder. You can add subfolders manually, but that makes updating and installing new applications more complicated.
    * Marking text and then attempting to drag the selected text elsewhere - sometimes works, sometimes doesn't (the drag operation simply selects some more text).
    * An application (for example, MPlayer OSX) can render the sound system completely unusable (to OpenGL/SDL games and applications, but not system sounds) such that not even a reboot helps. Only playing a regular 16-bit, 44.1kHz sound file in MPlayer solves the problem, or editing a setting in the obscure Utilities\Audio MIDI Setup.
    * My machine never crashes nor is ever powered down without a proper shutdown, and yet I have had several cases of files being corrupted, lost completely or simply set to "Zero KB", for no apparent reason. I have lost photos, audio files and others.
    * Network operations are unbelievably slow when talking to the other machines in the house. This is a 100Mbit wired LAN, but the speeds I'm actually getting are more like 10 Mbit/s for data flowing from the Mac to a PC and 200kbit/s in the opposite direction. Affects any kind of network operation (SMB, FTP, etc). I've tried various fixes suggested on various forums, no improvement.

    Applications
    * NeoOffice/J is unbelievably slow, taking as much as 30 seconds to load