10.1 Speed Not Acceptable

[jiblet]

For me personally, the practical benefits (for a web designer and programmer) of OS X are so great that any minor sluggishness does little to disappoint me. There is something I find humorous in all this though...

The constant comparisons between OS X, OS 9 and Windows performance are meaningless. THat's not to say that OS X performance is all good... I think Apple laid on the Aqua a little thick to force computer upgrades. Oh well, what are you gonna do, they make their money from hardware. My POINT however, is that u have to expect performance trade-offs for some benefits. Pre-emptive multi-tasking makes your computer do more things at once, but it doesn't make it faster, so therefore things are gonna take longer.

Of course, maybe some of you who find the performance unacceptable have mitigating issues in your systems that are actually making the performance much worse than mine. Still, it's hard to believe that even the naysayers aren't benefitting from being able to write a shell script as a scene renders in the background, or burn a CD while reading news, or even playing a game while compiling a program. For me, productivity has to do with being able to continue working, not resizing a window faster. I probably resize 10 windows in an 8 hour day. So if it takes 5 seconds to resize instead of the .5 seconds people expect, I am losing a whopping 1 minute of productivity per day. Whereas if I boot into OS 9 I spend AT LEAST 2 minutes for all my apps to boot where the system is essentially locked. Not to mention the various tasks that commandeer the system even during routine tasks (rendering 500 slashdot comments for instance).

OS X is still far from where it needs to be, but I'm already hooked. When I think about moving back to OS 9 or WinXP/2000 I see a solid 20% loss in productivity, and a 50% loss in compatibility/testing (PHP/MySQL/Apache/BBEdit/Photoshop/Dreamweaver). I'm still glad people are bitching though, because Apple seems to be listening.....

[billbaloney]

As a server, my little PowerBook running 10.1 is doing just fine. sshd, Apache, PHP, MySQL, ProFTPD they're all running along...much better than if I were developing to a Windows server right now.

In my calmer moments, I realize anew that the fact that I can run all of these processes under Mac applications, that this PowerBook is also a portable development server, is argument enough for OS X for me -- especially after much time spent (= wasted) configuring (= crying over) MoL in LinuxPPC.

I just hope that subsequent "updates" to the OS don't render the desktop interface even more sluggish than it has now become for me in 10.1.

[SCrossman]

I cannot understand how OS X can be so slow for some people. I find with 10.1 that I can even use OS X on a Wallstreet 266 PowerBook. Those who say it is like molasses must be in some kind of time-warped space continuum or something is really wrong with their install. I have installed it on approximately 8 macs so far and find the speed certainly acceptable. Window resizing does not keep up with the cursor if you move it fast, but I don't spend a lot of time resizing windows. It surely is not like Windows 2000, but I will be thankful for the many other reasons it is not like W2k. To the person commenting that classic takes a Gig of RAM, that is nonsense. It might be allocated that much in virtual memory space, but I am running it on a new 733 G4 with only 128mb of RAM (I will be adding a 512mb DIMM) and classic still loads and is certainly acceptable for our use in commercial desktop publishing. I find the speed on my two cubes to be more than acceptable except for some networking issues. The one thing that is slower than OS 9 is opening and closing windows, they don't just snap onto the screen like in OS 9, but kind of fade in slower. No big deal. I can accept the slower windows for the greater stability and being able to do many things at once. Don't use your iDisk while trying to manipulate anything in the Finder. iDisk is one of the banes of OS X.
I didn't do a clean install on anything but the Wallstreet and 733 G4. Every other Mac I have running X came from 10.0.0 on March 24th without a clean install with nary a problem in the upgrade.

[billbaloney]

Don't assume that the enormous amount of very capable people having problems with speed on OS X are fools or on acid -- that won't help anyone who is actually trying to deal with these issues. I am a developer who, as you can see, has been contributing to and learning from these boards on macosx.com since October of last year, and I have gone through many installs and upgrades on many machines.

Two Apple beta testers in this company upgraded their identical TiBooks last week from 10.0.4 to 10.1; while one ran into problems and had to run the upgrade twice, the other made it through the upgrade fine. Their end performance is similar, but not identical. This Lombard 400MHz PowerBook, with 512 MB of good RAM and a new, fast 20 GB disk drive, is experiencing major performance problems. The 10.0.4 install was made to this drive after a total reformat, and the 10.1 upgrade was the only major change to the system after that. The upgrade finished without a hitch, but I immediately noticed some of the problems that many have been referring to here.

The point is that with a software deployment this huge for what is essentially still a beta OS every well-considered viewpoint, and every well-measured datum, must be taken into account.

[GadgetLover]

Apparently, if you quit the LaunchCFM process, X 10.1's speed vastly improves!

[kcmac]

What is Launch CFM? How is it removed?

[ezra]

Originally posted by kcmac
What is Launch CFM? How is it removed?

The Process Viewer in Utilities.

[Just quit it]
[Doing some tasks now]
[Back]

Wow, and nice little pick me up.

Verified on my Biege G3 333 MT.

[kcmac]

Interesting. I will wait to see if this effects anything before I try it. Should it?