OS X--incredibly slow

Tombo:

Mac OS X's video system pumps out MUCH more complex stuff than 9's. That causes a perception of sluggishness. Of course, your 1 gHz iMac shouldn't feel nearly as sluggish because it is capable of using Quartz GL (or Quartz Extreme-stupid name) window acceleration.

But, as symphonix (and maybe others) mentioned, you _need_to_ buy_as_ much_ RAM_as_you_ can_afford. I still have 256 meg on my iMac, and causes performance hits as more and more complex programs are opened.

Once you get more RAM, leave your most often used programs running ALL the time (exception: Don't leave Classic programs running all the time). OS X is very efficient at managaing virtual memory. You won't have to wait as long when you want to use your programs.

I leave TextEdit, iTunes, Preview, System Prefs, Safari, and Entourage open almost all the time. If another program needs some of their memory, the system moves them to the swap file efficiently. I don't have to wait as long for the programs to load off the hard drive.
 
Tombo:

Also, there is no need to mess with virtual memory settings. OS X's Unix core manages virtual memory very efficiently.

But hard drives are much, much slower than RAM. Buy more RAM. You'll be glad you did.
 
Do you by any chance have an HP2xx. printer and 10.2? There is a bug in the HP communicator software which gradually eats all the processor capacity, slowing it to a crawl. Upgrading to 10.3 cures it or there is an applescript which will toggle to communicator on and off on the HP website
 
First of all, the Help taking a long time to launch ... well, that's because its trying to snag updates from online to make sure you have the latest help file. Its pretty much undocumented, but that's what's happening and why it takes a while to load. If you launch it, let it do its thing, quit, then relaunch, you'll see the launch time greatly improved.

2nd –_the reason OS 9 seems so 'fast' is that it was originally designed to HALT whatever it was doing when there was any user interaction. Click on a menu in OS 9 and leave it expanded - watch your machine do absolutely nothing until you release that mouse button. OS 9 wasn't fast - it was really good at dropping what it was doing to service the user immediately, but that made for HUGE tradeoffs in actual PERFORMANCE – and made for miserable multitasking. In OS X, the Finder is just another app which gets no more or less favor than any other app when trying to find processor time. It is truthful to say that OS X is less RESPONSIVE than 9, but the actual OS runs FASTER and performs the same functions FASTER on the low-level, even if your user-land interaction seems to be taking a hit.

I have a B&W G3 that i upgraded to G4 450 w/ 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon 7000 graphics card. Is it super lightning fast? No. But I can rip a DVD to DivX, import music w/ iTunes, use EyeTV to record some bootleg concerts from VHS, and my machine is still fine to use for websurfing and other duties while all this other stuff is going on. Could OS 9 ever do that? I think not. Therefore, OS X is faster to a degree of INFINITY in this case.

See, its all relative ...
 
Originally posted by thedbp
In OS X, the Finder is just another app which gets no more or less favor than any other app when trying to find processor time.
Click to expand...

I love this because that means you can force quit it without effecting any other apps. :D
 
Yes, OS X can be slow at times...hell, maybe a deal of the time. But remember what kind of hardware Mac OSX is running on....a processor built on 10 year old technology, SDRAM, a 100mhz system bus (on avarage, can vary)...people this isnt normal. The PC world, as you know, is going on much newer processors, DDR or even RDRAM, and 533mhz bus speeds. Just imagine what OSX might be like if it had those same values to work with...yes, a much faster, more responsive OS. But OSX isnt all speed, its about stability too. OSX is the best and most well built OS around.
 
I have a long post in the graphics forum about this.

I work on my mac for a living, and I regret upgrading to OS X. Speed is the issue, I need it and currently it just simply takes too long to do simple taks in X. I love the OS, so long as I'm not working in Photoshop/ImageReady or Dreamweaver.

All my files are low res, so it's not a file size problem. All my programs are updated (DW MX, PS 7, IR3) so that's not the prob. I have 10.2.4 installed, so that isn't it either. I have 832 Mb installed, so I would like to believe that is not the issue. The only thing I can think of is that it just doesn't work well in older G4s (I have an original 400), and if that is the case I wish I heard more honest feedback about it before I switched.

Please, I want to LOVE this OS, I really do. I love it's stability, it's cleanliness and it's networking abilities. But as for the meat, well, gimmee OS 9.2.
 
I have a G4/450/AGP and OS X was too slow to use, compared to OS 9, until I put a 1GHZ Powerlogix upgrade in it, then it ran great and haven't gone back to OS 9 since. Then I put a Radeon 8500 graphics card in and got another boost, Machine runs great now, 1.25GB Ram.
 
Thanks Bobw!

An upgrade like that costs about $500 clams, though, right? Although it's cheaper than having to fork out the dough for a new machine, it's not all THAT much cheaper, ya know? For $1100 more I get a kick-ass new machine.

But thank you, most mac users (I consider myself a Mac Evangelist, by the way. I swear and live by them) seem to be unwilling to admit that OS X might not be good for everybody. I knew I couldn't be the only person who was having problems like this.
 
This is from MacFixIt;

ALERT: Booting Mac OS 9 on 2003 (Mac OS X only) Macs

After months of searching, it seems that we have finally found a solution for booting Mac OS 9 on Macs released after January 1, 2003 - which are designated as exclusively capable of booting Mac OS X by Apple.

Apple recently posted a new file to its private Apple Service Provider web page (accessible only by account-holding Apple technicians and resellers) titled "MacTest Pro for Power Mac G4 (March 2003) Version 7.8.1 supports all iMac (Flat Panel) 15 inch systems only."

The file is a CD image which can be downloaded and burned, then used as a startup disk. Testing in "Mac OS X-only" flat panel iMac system revealed that the image properly booted Mac OS 9.

Users can then copy a stripped-down Mac OS 9 system folder to their hard drive, and select it with the "Startup Disk" System Preferences pane, delivering a Mac OS 9 bootable internal disk.

It appears that a new MacOS ROM file (ver. 9.8.1) allows booting from the image.

Of course, this solution is only readily accessible by Mac service providers, but it shows that Mac OS 9 boots are not impossible on Apple's new machines. Also, please note that Mac OS 9 startup was not tested on any machines other than the 2003 flat-panel iMac.

UPDATE: The iMac tested in this report had a serial number later than xx303xxxxxx. Knowledge Base article #86209 states that these models boot Mac OS X only.
 
What does Faster mean?

I'm as guilty as anyone for bringing up the OS9 is faster than OSX issues, but for me, faster means:
a) 9 boots quicker
b) 9 loads apps quicker
c) 9 opens/closes/resizes windows quicker

I can get round these problems by:
a) Use sleep mode in X (bad one for me as my battery's dead)
b) When X boots, click everything I'm going to use on the dock in this session and then go and make a cup of tea.
When I get back everything has loaded and I just switch between them (quickly!)
c) Aggggggh, Aqua is just trying to do too much stuff to give me snappy windows. I use a powerbook so the option of getting a graphics card supported by Quartz Extreme isn't available.

At work I use W2K on a PIII (800Mhz so i've been told) and it seems (feels?) faster! But in real world term things take less time to achive on my lowly PB-400?

Perception counts for a lot, Apple needs to speed up Aqua (Quartz Extreme is a good start) but they should also give us the option of a simplfied UI (here i go again... How about the old OS9 GUI widgets running on X).

I think I'll up my memory from 320Mb to 512Mb and give X another try.
 
Hey abyard, I guess a lot of people would have different idea's of what is and isn't faster depending on what they are trying to do with the machine.

Faster to me means just that, faster. I am having problems doing simple functions in Photoshop and Dreamweaver, like file open, layer style executions, etc. It's painfully slow, and unless I am just lazily folling around in the program I findd it impossible to do any productive work. Here is a link to the thread I started on it previously:

http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29294
 
As far as the password goes, I had a friend that had major probs with it. Couldnt get back in to do anything. When I set up my computer, I left the password blank (no networking) and just skip it everytime I need to do any admin. Works great......:D Besides, I hate passwords.....:eek:
 
I didnt read all of the thread (stopped after about the tenth post). I find that on my g3 400 os X Jaguar is slower than nine for single tasks. However, I am a user of unix, windows and MAC, and am well used to running mutliple things at once, and moreimportantly starting things up and then going of to do other things. Overall I get MUCH better use out of the hardware on OSX, and have to restart about once every month or two.


And to top it alll of the sleep/wake is awsome on a laptop. Open the lid and its usable. Worth the marginal battery sacrifice. Microsoft could take many lessons from the convencince of this feature, as even with XP, the sleep is not instant enough to be seamless, but it is in X
 
Originally posted by twister
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.
Click to expand...

You could compare apples to oranges, OS 9 didn't have dynamic memory, trying to think of a windows version that didn't have this.. Win 1.3?
 
I recently bought a DP 1 GHZ and though some things are slow (opening files in Dreamweaver for example - what is up with that?), I find the machine incredibly fast and far more productive than my little old 2.4 GHz Pentium Windows 2000 PC sitting next to it that I have to use all day, every day for work.

The Mac boots faster, launches apps much much faster and doesn't have the HD grind away all day for God only knows what reason. Plus its multitasking capabilities are awesome. I may be biased, but I would rather be on my Mac all day than on my PC.
 
The reason faster machines are always accompanied by slower applications is that users don't get faster, but programmers are expected to achieve more. So programmers depend more and more on computers being able to interpret high level code so that the programmers don't have to work for nine months completing a little tiny feature just because they have to translate it into machine code.

As for why programs actually get larger? Bad programmers and large graphics files. Really. That and feature bloat. When was the last time someone listed reduced application size as a feature? No one cares about that.

So Aqua is a bit sluggish, especially on PCI based video cards, especially in the Finder. But if you talk about networking, file transfer, dual processor utilization, or sleep, OS X is so much faster it makes you cry. Well, it makes me cry anyway.

So OS 9's graphics layer was super lightweight, which allowed it to be really fast even on low end video hardware. This meant that the machine was often busy doing UI stuff and couldn't do anything else. How fast do files copy if you have your mouse button down in Mac OS 9 eh?

I'll agree, the UI needs to come up to speed a little bit with Aqua. I want instant gratification with some of my file browsing and I'm not getting it. But let's at least be specific about what is slow with OS X. It's Aqua. OS X eats a lot of RAM but it's not slow. Aqua is slow, and that's usually on PCI cards. The Finder is slow, because it still thinks it's in Mac OS 9 I'm fairly certain.
 
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