OS X--incredibly slow

[wyvern]

I like www.macsales.com. I've also heard that Ramjet is good.

[twister]

Originally posted by symphonix
The help browser speed problem was a bug in the early releases of Mac OS X, and has since been fixed.

My help still blows. It takes a long time to open. If i accidently open it i have to force quit it because i don't wanna wait that long to do a regular quit. If it's fixed what did i miss? How do i fix it?

[twister]

Originally posted by jocknerd
Please don't compare OS 9 with OS X. It would be like putting Windows 3.1 on a Pentium 4 machine and then comparing its performance with Windows XP.

I don't understand this. How is Windows 3.1 like OS 9? Wouldn't OS 7 be more like Windows 3.1? 9 was one step before X as 2000 was one step before XP. ( that is if i have my pc software right )

I do agree that it's hard to compare and I to fell that 9 is faster but the things i can do in X by far beat out the speed issues.

[Urbansory]

Well if you use photoshop with large files, max out your ram. I have files over 100mb, at times even larger, and PS eats memory. But i also leave Illustrator, flash and other apps open since i need to jump between them often. Extra scratch disk space and a fast drive will help as well since Photoshop writes out a lot of data as you work. I have a 15 gB scratch disc partition on another drive for all my scratch files from any apps which is also the place I toss my downloads.

[tonbo]

Yes, it was in fact it was Mac Help which initially led me to believe that the iMac had frozen--the spinning cursor went on and on and on, so I kept force-quitting it. Then once I just left it, went somewhere else to do something and when I came back, lo and behold, there was Mac Help.

As I said before, it reminds me of my 512E, where you could launch MS Word 3.2 and go get a cup of coffee before it was finished launching.

Why, with every advance in CPU speed, is there always a corresponding increase in software bloat, so one never seems to be making any progress at all? By the time the CPU gets to 1 terabyte Mhz the System will require 1.2 terabytes of RAM to run in.

BTW, for those of you who have the new iMacs: is it completely impossible to boot from OS 9? What does one do for a Norton Utilities-type boot?

[Arden]

Compare Word 3.2 with Word X, and you should be able to deduce why software gets more bloated as hardware becomes more powerful. (Microsoft may not be the best example, but it works well enough. Good luck getting Word X, 2001, or even 98 to work on you 512E. )

[mindbend]

I spent a lot of time early on bashing OS X's speed, mostly in the graphics layer really, everything else is on par or faster for me (apps launch about the same, some faster, some slower...file transfers over networks are way faster in X, printer access and network mounting is way slower in X, hopefully that will improve, the list goes on...)

Anyway, once I got over the fact that the GUI is sluggish (for now), I found myself months later being WAY more productive in X. Keep in mind, I make my living on my Macs, so I am very critical about performance, stability, etc. X is the bomb and it's just the beginning. Once this OS is sitting on the proper machines in a few months to a couple of years, there wil be no mistaking its power.

As it stands right now, I am very happy with X over all. The multitasking powers on the DP machines are astounding. It's amazing how much you can throw at it without too much slow down or choking.

[symphonix]

I'll be honest. I still find OS X very slow on my iBook 500, but it is worth it for all the extra functionality. I only boot into 9 now when I want to run Photoshop, and then only if I've got a fair bit of work to do.

My figure of 300mb was arrived at by adding up all the memory consumption for a basic install of X 10.2.4. I am running this on a 128mb system, so it needs to use virtual memory a lot, in fact pageouts outnumber page-ins, so it is using VM more than half the time.

I imagine on 256mb it would use VM about 20% of the time. At 512 mb you could run Mac OS X and a handful of small apps without using VM at all, though it would still be paging when you open big applications.

Compared to Mac OS 9, the core system of X takes up 8 to 10 times as much RAM to operate!

That said, it is worth the performance hit for all the extra functionality, and a bit more RAM really helps.