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

I love OS X

[BoomerSooner]

OS X is the only OS I"ve ever installed that subsequent versions speed up my older computers. Amazing... I'm waiting for an Apple Intel Tower and I'll retire my G4 Tower.

Damn ADC interface.. what am i to do with this big ass cinema display?!?!!?

Re:I love OS X

[IHSW]

Clearly you've never installed Windows 2000 over Windows ME.

Re:I love OS X

[kc0re]

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

Re:I love OS X

[Wingsy]

And if you bitch about having to buy an adapter to drive your Cinema with your new Mac, they may give you a 99 dollar discount right over the phone. They did for me when I bought my Quad.

Re:I love OS X

[v1]

Damn ADC interface.. what am i to do with this big ass cinema display?!?!!?

As you may or may not be aware, the ADC connection provides a DVI signal, USB port, AND power. The display has no power pack, and gets its juice from the computer. If you have only a DVI port, you will require a rather large adapter. It's not so much an adapter as it is a "power injector" that injects power into the cable whilst converting it from DVI+USB to ADC. This takes the form of what looks like a very large white power brick from a powerbook.

They are unfortunately rather expensive. ($150?) You can get them from Apple, or from Dr Bott.

The other answer is of course to find a graphics artist or developer that does not already have a second display, and sell it to them. Odds are very hight that if you bring the display over and let them "test drive" it for even five minutes they'll buy it immediately.

Dupe several years later?

[rg3]

Check this: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 6/03/130214

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

Panther to Tiger?

[fa_king]

I updated from Panther(10.3) to Tiger(10.4) and my machine seemed slower. I decided to do a fresh install, and things improved, as always the fresh install is better than an update.

I still think that Panther was running a bit faster tahn Tiger, maybe it is the widgets..........
silly widgets!

This was all done on a PowerBook G4(TiBook).

Re:Panther to Tiger?

[CottonEyedJoe]

I have two slower Macs, A G3 500 MHz iBook running 10.4.5 and a Blue and White G3 400 MHz running 10.3.9. The iBook is a bit faster for everyday tasks and that hasnt always been the case (the tower has a faster bus, faster graphics card, faster disk etc...). One thing you MUST do on older macs running Tiger OR Panther is upgade your RAM to a reasonable level, which usually means maxing it out. Even then I had to turn off dashboard on the iBook (I dont really use it on any of my macs anyway).

Both machines are still great for general desktop work and light development. I bumped the iBook to Tiger (OSX) to get Tiger (Java), and I havent really bothered to upgrade the tower because I havent had the time and its not a pressing concern for me. But given the results on the iBook, I dont expect a performance hit when I do upgrade.

Linux

[metamatic]

Linux gets faster too.

Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was a pretty big jump in speed. I just upgraded to the latest KDE and a bunch of other updates, and got another performance jump. Once they shake the bugs out of the Radeon drivers for X.org, I'll get accelerated X, and another big speed boost.

In fact, of the major OSs, it's pretty much only Windows that keeps getting slower.

Re:Linux

[mclaincausey]

Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was a pretty big jump in speed.

That's true, but don't expect another jump of that relative magnitude anytime soon. The 2.6 introduced a new scheduling algorithm that boosted speed and concurrency significantly. When your scheduler goes from an O(n) to an O(1) algorithm, implements CPU affinity, and eliminates lock contention for the run queue, the speed boost is significant. I guess there could be filesystem improvements or paging improvements in the pipeline that could provide significant speed boosts, but I kind of doubt they would be as critical as that brilliant new scheduling algorithm.

OTOH the inter-version speed boosts in OS X have been due to more subtle tweakage, except perhaps for speed boosts related to launchd, and have been more incremental in nature than the anomalous 2.4-2.6 improvement.

I guess my point is that the 2.4-2.6 improvement is more of a leap than it is a trend, where OS X's improvements have been less revolutionary and more evolutionary. I hope Linux continues to improve in performance, but it's very possibly going to suffer from bloat down the road that could offset some performance improvements. It's unrealistic to expect the performance improvements to continue along the lines of 2.4-2.6, in any case. OS X is still lagging in performance, so it's even more imperative that it continue its trend. Hopefully the researchers at Apple will soon find a revolutionary improvement on the order of the 2.6 scheduler to catch up a bit.

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.

Ten things they should fix

[laurensv]

somebody made a list about ten things that don't work as well as they should (and as a mac admin I agree) : Ten More Things I Hate About Mac OS X

Re:Pointless Effects

[Rocketship Underpant]

Unlike Windows, OS X is composited on the video hardware, and the effort to produce most of those visual effects is done by the GPU, hardware that would otherwise be idle. Turning them off wouldn't give you any speed gains on the CPU, from what I understand.

Re:Call me weird, but...

[Haeleth]

OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. It had its problems, sure, but at the time it was the only mainstream OS that was not built on technology besides itself.

It was also the only mainstream OS that could not handle filenames more than 31 letters long, the only mainstream OS that didn't have protected memory, and the only mainstream OS that didn't have any form of preemptive multitasking.

The first of these is the most ironic. Back in 1999, Mac users were still ridiculing "Micros~1", while in fact it was their operating system, not Microsoft's, which could not handle adequately long filenames!

But it was the second and third, the lack of basic features essential for the stability of modern desktop applications, which led to it being such an unreliable system. No surprise that Apple were so keen to ditch the whole crufty thing in favour of the modern platform that became OS X. OS 9 was totally failing to salvage their rapidly declining reputation. OS X was their salvation.

So, yes, OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. But so did its unfortunate users... loudly and regularly.

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:Call me weird, but...

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

Anyone who spent any time trying to debug extension conflicts did not shed a tear for OS 9.

OS 9 seemed faster because the first iteration of OS X, which people tended to run on the same hardware, was dog slow.

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:Call me weird, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even MS is originally based on VMS, so in fact, everything is based on some form of *nix."

For the short of memory...

There were a LOT of operating systems before *nix. One of the main creaters of OSses was Digital Equipment Corporation. They had an OS for each of their different computer systems (PDP-1 through PDP-20, also known as DECsystem-20). All these OSses had a different architecture, because they wer built for different purposes. However, DEC standardised the CLI on these OSses. The CLI was called DCL (Digital Command Language).

ATT (Bell Labs) were using DEC systems with when they decided to create their own OS. IIRC they used a PDP-7, and later PDP-11's running RSX-11. So, instead of everything being based on *nix, it's the other way around. All the *nixes are "inspired" by the other OSses at the time, in particular RSX-11 and DCL.

VMS (later OpenVMS) was the world's first commercial computer using a virtual memory system. That's why it's called VMS. It was meant as a successor to RSX-11, and it ran on VAX computers (Virtual Address eXtention). The chief VMS architect Dave Cutler was hired by Microsoft to help create Windows NT. Windows NT later became W2K, WXP etc.

So, also Windows is NOT based on *nix.

As far as I can tell, actually only Linux is based on *nix.
Anybody know any other OS that is based on or inspired by Unix?

Well, duh!

[Space cowboy]

Quoth the parent:

For all the talk about the speed of OS X, Apple has never addressed the most obvious issue: on a machine that can run either OS 9 or OS X, OS 9 is very much faster.

OS9 did a lot less than OSX, which is why it was faster. OSX is a *lot* more reliable. Examples:

• OS9 didn't have pre-emptive multitasking, so one bug somewhere in one program could bring the system to its knees. I saw that happen far too many times...
  
• OS9 didn't have memory protection, so if a pointer went outside the current app's address space, it could quite happily scribble random data all over another application.
  
• ... I could go on...
  

Before OSX, the mac had the reputation of the machine that crashed all the time. By comparison, Windows was actually pretty reliable (this was before all the spyware/malware/crap that affects it recently, remember). Linux was best, of course...

They took an OS written from the ground up in the early 80s to be graphical, and replaced it with an OS written the 70s to be textual, with the GUI glued on top of it

Now you're just displaying your ignorance

• The mac UI isn't the same as most unix ones - it's not X.
• Even if it were X, for "glued on top", you really need to use "seamlessly integrated". The 'everything is a file' mantra of unix design actually works really well for X.
• The core of the OS is a micro-kernel message-passing system (mach), which was developed between 1985 and 1994
• ... etc....

And then even worse, the people who wrote Carbon, the MacOS backward-compatibility layer, had no idea how to write it to be fast - simple calls like HLock which used to be two instructions on the original 128K Mac are now thousands of cycles under OS X

newsflash:when you need to do more work because you're in a far-more-capable and complex environment, it can take more machine-instructions to perform the task. This is just griping - the world has moved on from buggy, insecure, crappy-old OS9. Move with it.

They didn't throw any babies away, they did what they needed to do (ditch the abortion that was OS9) and move onto a new platform which provided the security, flexibility, and reliability that any modern OS provides. A brave decision, under the circumstances, and one well-conceived and executed.

Simon