I am currently running OSX on three machines. I have an iMac DV 400 and an iMac Blueberry 500, each with 256 MB RAM. I also have a Dual G4 533 DA with 1.25 GB RAM. OSX runs quite well on all three machines.
The are only two situations in which I have any performance issues at all with any of these machines running OSX.
I use IB for testing different interface designs while building Cocoa apps. Sometimes, as I sit with a client reviewing and trying different live interface arrangements on an app, I will duplicate a given window or panel and its children many, many times. This can generate some very large .NIB files. IB will "pause" for just under one second on my iMac DV 400 when saving .NIB files with more than 250 windows and their contents, and also when opening a given window from within the .NIB file. I have solved this by moving common "groups" of components in the windows into custom views and creating palettes containing these groups. I then populate the windows and panels with instances of the common views. This gives me a great performance improvement while testing interfaces. I have also found that if I create multiple nib files, one for each primary window and its related panels, all tied together using a project and each sharing the palette of common views, I again experience a speed increase. This is an obvious "best practices" design process anyway, but I have found it very helpful. Please note, my compiled applications which access these large nib files do not have any performance problems. I have had no performance issues with these large .NIB files on my other macs.
The second performance problem I have is related directly to Internet Explorer. I frequently open thirty or more browser windows at a time, and if there is a runtime error in one of the browser windows, all of the IE windows stop responding for a while, sometimes resulting in a crash in the application.
Neither of these issues ever impact the performance of other applications on the machine.
The are only two situations in which I have any performance issues at all with any of these machines running OSX.
I use IB for testing different interface designs while building Cocoa apps. Sometimes, as I sit with a client reviewing and trying different live interface arrangements on an app, I will duplicate a given window or panel and its children many, many times. This can generate some very large .NIB files. IB will "pause" for just under one second on my iMac DV 400 when saving .NIB files with more than 250 windows and their contents, and also when opening a given window from within the .NIB file. I have solved this by moving common "groups" of components in the windows into custom views and creating palettes containing these groups. I then populate the windows and panels with instances of the common views. This gives me a great performance improvement while testing interfaces. I have also found that if I create multiple nib files, one for each primary window and its related panels, all tied together using a project and each sharing the palette of common views, I again experience a speed increase. This is an obvious "best practices" design process anyway, but I have found it very helpful. Please note, my compiled applications which access these large nib files do not have any performance problems. I have had no performance issues with these large .NIB files on my other macs.
The second performance problem I have is related directly to Internet Explorer. I frequently open thirty or more browser windows at a time, and if there is a runtime error in one of the browser windows, all of the IE windows stop responding for a while, sometimes resulting in a crash in the application.
Neither of these issues ever impact the performance of other applications on the machine.
