iBook vs. PowerBook performance

chadwick

chadwick

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The "executive summary" question: how much real-world performance would I see going from a 1GHz G4 iBook to a 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook?

The background: I "switched" my productivity machine from a high-end PC to this iBook a few months ago. I specifically went low-end in case this experiment failed, but a few annoying issues aside it has actually been quite a good experience. My remaining problem is really software development.

The iBook is just about near worthless (for what I am used to) when it comes to performance in development. I do mostly Java work, and even my IDE (and Office 2004 for that matter) crawl on this machine. It's not a lack of memory (this one has 768MB), it's CPU and disk speed.

As an experiment lately, I've been compiling a stable build of the Mozilla Firefox browser on a variety of machines. The iBook is taking about 93 minutes to consistently build the application. My PC workstation is down to about 23 minutes. I don't expect workstation class performance out of a laptop of course, but something on the order of 40-60 minutes would be a great improvement, obviously.

So, given that G5 PowerBooks aren't available now, and aren't likely to be anytime in the near future, I'm looking at the G4 PowerBooks. Obviously a 500MHz CPU bump isn't anything to sneeze at, and you can get a 5400 RPM disk on them (although why not one of the 7200 RPM laptop disks available now? grr). The memory speed is PC2700 instead of PC2100 would obviously help the CPU scale better.

So, those who happen to do software development, would these current PowerBooks really give me the boost I'm looking for, or am I better off just waiting for the G5 world to go mobile?

cheers

p.s. Safari is the slowest POS app I have ever seen. Even with all the speed improvements I've found on a variety of forums, the sites I visit just absolutely kill it. It freaks out with animated gifs. At least Firefox is somewhat stable these days. :(
 
chadwick said:
p.s. Safari is the slowest POS app I have ever seen. Even with all the speed improvements I've found on a variety of forums, the sites I visit just absolutely kill it. It freaks out with animated gifs. At least Firefox is somewhat stable these days. :(
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Odd, While I have not used FireFox in some time, Safari SMOKES Netscape (both 6 and 7) on my 1Ghz iBook. I find it to be a great browser. What kind of sites are you going to?
 
If you are mostly dealing with java, Macs using osx might not be the best choice for you. Java is very badly implemented and not optimized at all. Of course the powerbooks will perform better than the ibooks, but never 50% better, than the clock speed would suggest. The "faster" memory is not fully supported and won't give any noticeable speed bump compared to PC2100. I am wondering if you have to get a book. I think the G5 powermac would suit your needs much better and give you a very high performance/price quotient.
But this doesn't mean, the powerbooks are bad. In my field, multiple sequence alignment tools are very frequently used and my G4 1Ghz performs much better than our P4 3Ghz workstation from dell. It was a very clear decision for me to use macs instead of x86 machines with linux/windows..
 
Java tends to run slowly on OS X mainly because Apple hasn't done anything to implement the server VM, and the client VM isn't all too optimized since its being developed by Apple and they've got so many things to develop at a time. That said, if you're using Eclipse, you might want to take a look at Netbeans. SWT doesn't really provide good performance on anything other than Windows. On the other hand, Swing for OS X is integrated into QuartzExtreme, and runs mighty fine.

Office2004 will crawl on the Mac. http://www.barefeats.com/wp.html has a benchmark showing how slow Office 2004 is compared to Office v.X. I don't think Office is going to be much faster on the 1.5 Ghz powerbook.

Can't really help you with the compilation speed. I've noticed that compile times on PowerPC chips tend to be slower than comparable x86 chips. I haven't tried the G5 (since I'm a poor comp science student), so I can't say anything about their performance. Upgrading the disk drive may not help, since with enough RAM, the swap file isn't really being used anyway so a faster hard drive won't help.
 
I'd consider a G5 iMac, if I were you. Max the ram and it should give some better benchmarks.
As far as VPC, it's pretty slow on every Mac, but there are things you can do to speed it up (kill the eye candy and sound). Using Safari Enhancer and/or pithhelmet? Both help speed up Safari, as do keeping autofill streamlined and clearing out the Safari icons on a regular basis.
 
Zammy-Sam said:
If you are mostly dealing with java, Macs using osx might not be the best choice for you. Java is very badly implemented and not optimized at all.
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Interesting. One of the reasons I tried the switch was all the geeks I saw at JavaOne and when I visited Sun that were using PowerBooks for their Java development. Maybe they're just very patient people (or jusst doing their editing with vim!)
 
baggss said:
Odd, While I have not used FireFox in some time, Safari SMOKES Netscape (both 6 and 7) on my 1Ghz iBook. I find it to be a great browser. What kind of sites are you going to?
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I haven't tried Netscape at all on here; Firefox has always been quite a bit faster than regular Netscape or even regular Mozilla.

I do visit a lot of web forums, which is where I notice it a lot. Actually any place with animated gifs is what kills it especially. I can really tell the difference between Safari and FireFox with those. If you go to http://www.nuclearbunny.org/images/smilies/index.html you can have a good set to compare with a variety of browsers. For whatever reason, Safari doens't do the animation very efficiently. If you really want to see it crawl, use index2.html instead.

Another thing I notice a lot with Safari is that the tabbed browsing doesn't work as well as in Firefox. I don't think I never have a situation in Firefox were activity in one tab blocks activity in another tab. But, in Safari, I'll often see the beachball when any single tab is busy reloading, etc. For someone who multi-tasks as much as I do, this is unbearable. Luckily Firefox has come a long way. :)
 
Safari on my iBook G3 runs fine with the 1st link of animated gifs. No slow down or stuttering visible. It isn't quite so smooth with the 2nd link. Same thing with Firefox.

Keep in mind though, in the background I'm currently compiling Qt and its taking a few hours to compile. That probably slows things down quite a bit.

What other apps do you have open when you view the gifs? I've got Mail, ICQ, Terminal (compiling Qt) Firefox and Safari running. Both Safari and Firefox have a few tabs open and are viewing different sites.
 
chadwick said:
Interesting. One of the reasons I tried the switch was all the geeks I saw at JavaOne and when I visited Sun that were using PowerBooks for their Java development. Maybe they're just very patient people (or jusst doing their editing with vim!)
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What IDE are you using? I'm guessing its Eclipse. My experience has been that Netbeans runs a lot better than Eclipse on the Mac.
 
Viro said:
What IDE are you using? I'm guessing its Eclipse. My experience has been that Netbeans runs a lot better than Eclipse on the Mac.
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IntelliJ IDEA, actually. It's been the fastest (and certainly most productive) Java IDE I've used. It performs well even on a 1GHz P3, but no where near useful level on this 1GHz G4.
 
Viro said:
Safari on my iBook G3 runs fine with the 1st link of animated gifs. No slow down or stuttering visible. It isn't quite so smooth with the 2nd link. Same thing with Firefox.

Keep in mind though, in the background I'm currently compiling Qt and its taking a few hours to compile. That probably slows things down quite a bit.

What other apps do you have open when you view the gifs? I've got Mail, ICQ, Terminal (compiling Qt) Firefox and Safari running. Both Safari and Firefox have a few tabs open and are viewing different sites.
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You don't notice a dramatic difference in "frame rate" on the animated gifs between Safari and Firefox, especially on the first link? Firefox is displaying them about twice as fast as Safari does (and indeed about the same rate I see them on other hardware).
 
They display at about the same framerate in Safari and Firefox. They're rather smooth animations with no jerkiness at all and there is no visible difference between the two. Its only on the 2nd link (index2.html) do I get a lot of stuttering, in Safari and Firefox.

Dunno what it could be. I'm using the latest version of Safari v1.2.2(v125.8) if that helps any.
 
Safari works really good on my 1ghz powerbook. I have yet to find a browser to match it that handles plugins like safari too. The fact that Safari can also emulate other browsers is great.
 
Viro said:
They display at about the same framerate in Safari and Firefox. They're rather smooth animations with no jerkiness at all and there is no visible difference between the two. Its only on the 2nd link (index2.html) do I get a lot of stuttering, in Safari and Firefox.

Dunno what it could be. I'm using the latest version of Safari v1.2.2(v125.8) if that helps any.
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Yeah, same version here. Interesting. I wonder why it would be different for me.

By any chance does that Virex thing from .Mac do anything with the browser? I got the impression it was a boot-time scan only, but that is just an assumption...
 
Could be possible. I don't run any virus scanners on my machine since there really aren't any Mac viruses in the wild. I've got Sophos installed and I give it a scan once a month, but otherwise, it doesn't load itself at start up.

Safari shouldn't be slow on your system. I've got a G3 800 Mhz and half the RAM you have so hardware shouldn't be the problem.
 
chadwick,

Bottom line, if you're looking for a high-performance Mac, you'll need to look at one with a G5. The G4s simply haven't kept up. G5 Powerbooks might be here after Christmas.

A low end or mid-range Power Mac G5 would cost about the same as the 15" Powerbooks, if you can get by with a desktop.

I agree with drunkmac, viru and diablojota--Safari shouldn't be showing a lot of spinning beachballs. Be sure to trash your prefs and repair permissions.

Probably the reason you see so many Java programmers using OS X is they're sick and tired of Microsoft and Windows. OS X is a practical alternative, relatively free from problems. Better in many--but not all--ways.

Doug
 
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