Is it my install or is X too slow

jove

jove

Member
Hello,
Are other X users running into the same application load times I am? X is making MacOS 9 look peppy!

iBook DV, 500Mhz G3, 10Gig HD, and 128MB RAM.

Sample load times right after a restart. The only application loaded at login is Drop Drawers.

1) System Preferences - 8 seconds
2) OmniWeb Splash Screen - 20 seconds
3) OmniWeb Full Load - 30 seconds
4) Mac Help from Finder - 20 seconds
5) QuickTime w/o Document - 20 seconds
6) Not to mention IE and Classic :-(

Jove

 
I have the same speed issues on my PowerBook due to the fact that I only have 128 megs of RAM. My Desktop G4 has half a gig and slams right through those things like no tomarrow.

Apple recomends a MINIMUM of 128 which really isn't enough due to my two day expereince.

Although on a brief side note, BSD has a much more effecient way of handling swap files (virtual memory) than any other OS (I could be wrong, so don't quote me on this!) so this could always be worse! Although I don't see a traditional swap partition.

-Jim
 

I have been running OS X public beta since October, 2000.
OSX 10.0 is noticeably slower than the public beta. I
find myself glaring at that spinning rainbow disk much
more than I used to be. This is disappointing, as some
here indicated that the more recent OS X loads were 3
times faster than the public beta.

PowerMac G4, 256MB, 20GHD-OSX, 20GHD-OS9.1

 
Well, I guess it is not not my machine. I too found PB faster than Final.

I was expecting a nice speed increase after reading reviews of 4K78, so what gives now?

I am hoping that is is just the way I have my 333 iMac (192mb) setup. 9.0 upped to 9.1 from download, the OS X "Not for Resale" store version (couldn't wait for fedex).

I will let you all know if I find a difference in speed once my OS X-in-a-box arrives later this week.
 
I crossed the same slow issues with PowerBook G3 400/192, but only under UFS as far as i try, but anyway my first was so long, strange... for example on after my first installation my Airport card was not recoignzed... and many strange things of that kind. I just change my Hard Drive for a 20 Go, then re-installed OS X on HFS+ file system, and everything work fine finally. I don't know what happend with this OS, but don't be desapointed if something strange happend...






Bartintosh
___________________________________
On quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot...
 
I am finding the OS X IE to be much slower than the classic version, especially when popping up select lists. It pauses <i>noticeably</i> and displays the spinning wheel... RAM cannot be the problem - I have 448 MB - and while my beige G3 is "only" 266 Mhz, something very inefficient is happening here. I wonder if Apple skipped the optimizations in order to make the Mar 24 release date?
 
Hi,

I find os X running siginficaally slow compare to OX9.1,
I have 192M of RAM and 20G HD.

I am thinking about upgrading my mac soon but who is to say
I won't find any improvement?

 
Hello,

I was told on another forum (Apple's) that Powerbook (and I imagine iBook) support is truly lacking in this release.

The suggestion to to turn of "economy ", wherever that is, should speed things up. Another suggestion was to nice the background tasks to lower priorities. I haven't tried it yet.

I find it interesting that I can drag a transparaent playing QT movie without ANY hesitation but the system takes 30 seconds to load simple applications. Could this be an issue of finding and linking libraries to applications?

jove
 
You say:

I find it interesting that I can drag a transparaent playing QT movie without ANY hesitation but the system takes 30 seconds to load simple applications. Could this be an issue of finding and linking libraries to applications?

Another reason may be the need to parse the .nib files containing Cocoa resources.

However, on a stable dynamically paged VM system application startup time does not really matter; you start an application first thing in the morning, and shut it down when you're done, 4 weeks later. The same applies to boot times :)
 
ladavacm,
Unfortunately my portable with 128 RAM means I am shutting down a lot and quiting apps to avoid to much paging!

I would have hoped that .NIB parsing would be as quick or quicker than PowerPlant's Constructor resources.

jove
 
Well, I got my OS X (tuesday, through educational channel), and although the shipping was quick, I can't say the same for the OS itself (at least not on my iMac 333).

I noticed a slight speed increase (very slight) on my iMac with the box version as opposed to the reseller demo version, however it is only really noticeable with iTunes visuals.

The speed of the OS itself is not to slow, although apps take longer to boot than in 9.1 obviously. The big hit that I am getting is the graphics. For example, my screen saver (Cosmos) is a slide show with about three seconds between slides. Quicktime is unusable, and the risizing of windows is painful.

The speed of the OS on a Powermac G4 400, on the other hand, is quite peppy. And the graphics are so sweet (Cosmos screen saver is AMAZING with Plone playing in the background).

Now except for Altivec, the G4 is not that much different than the G3, so that leaves the video card as the most likely possibility. The drivers for the 128 AGP seem to be very good indeed, whereas the driver for the Rage pro are garbage. Will Apple (or ATI) release a decent driver for this card, or are all of us original iMac owners screwed out of OS X?

Apple had told us that OS X will run on these machines, in fact Steve himself once said "Look at the iMac" when asked the req's for OS X (and this was the original). Have they forgotten this promise?

Now before any of you start saying things like "well it is only version 1 of this new OS" remember how long we have waited for this, and what we were told as to what could run it. Apple; nice OS, but if you don't come out with a better solution for the original iMac (remember what the original iMac did for you) you will be pissing off ALOT of people.
 
but that says nothing about the slow menus, window resizing, application launching, and other basic functions of the OS.
 
My experience with macos X as been strange. The programs in classic environment runs basicaly at the same speed thar with os 9.0.4. and the startup of the programs in X is very slow. slower than the startus progs in classic. I've been testing classic with InDesign, Photoshop, Filemaker and word.

In the X i've used the basic programs, yet.
 
Originally posted by russgold
but that says nothing about the slow menus, window resizing, application launching, and other basic functions of the OS.
Click to expand...

Your right, however I was mainly bitching about Quicktime and the screensaver (not that the screensaver is important). I Don't have a problem with the speed of my app launching (a bit slow, but not too much)

One thing however, I was mistaken when I thought the window resizing was a result of the driver issue. There is an interesting thread on Macnn detailing the lack of hardware acceleration for Quartz. It seems this is done by the CPU, which would explain the peppiness on a G4 (using Altivec).

check out
http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/Forum33/HTML/002448.html
 
Macosrumors has a command to speed up X. I haven't seen an increase :-(

sudo update_prebinding -root /

Has anybody?

Jove
 

I read on MacNN about opening up a terminal app and entering the command: "sudo update_prebinding -root /". This has something to do with helping the CPU to navigate the filesystem faster? It takes about 15 minutes to complete.

They say this is done when you install the developer's tools, which I have. However, I have also downloaded a lot of applications since then, like Omniweb, Xtools, etc.

It seems to me that this command really does help. Omniweb now comes up in 22 bounces instead of 37 bounces. This is on a PowerMac G4, 450MHz, 256MB, 2x20GBHDs.

 
There are a few options that can help speed up your system without sacrificing other performance variables (i.e., without reducing color to thousands, etc.).

1) You can use the prebind terminal hack, as listed in other posts. You won't see any effect in speed if you have already installed the Developer Tools as that install does the prebind for you.

2) You can install one of the "unreleased" updates that are circulating on these threads and on Carracho.

3) You can buy/borrow a copy of Norton Utilities (latest version, I believe 7) adn boot from that CD. The run Disk Doctor and Speed Disk. The OS X install leaves your HDD in a complete mess.

4) If you are on a G4 you can boot into 9.1 and then run Software Update. there is a new firmware updater 4.8.1 (I believe) which makes some AGP enhancements to the system.
 
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