On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 8:49 PM, Kris Tilford <[email protected]> wrote:

> I don't agree with this article. My experience is that the hit on
> performance is closer to the 15-20% range for any PPC Mac running
> Leopard as compared to the faster Tiger.

I have only tried 10.5 on a single PowerPC Mac - my 20" iMac G5 - but
the machine felt significantly slower under 10.5 than with 10.4. Not
massively but I agree, 10% orso sounds plausible to me.

Unfortunately, on my 10.4-only iBook G4, I am starting to find apps
that only support 10.5+ now - such as Growl. I may be forced to
upgrade just to be able keep my apps current. :¬(

I'd go with 10.4 for any PPC box, unless the latest versions of the
apps you want don't run under it. Obviously, if you need Classic, it
has to be 10.4.

> EXACTLY! And this is the problem with the article you cited above. The
> comparison was done on the same Mac, BUT, the problem is that only one
> HD was used, and it was a triple booting (three partitions) of one
> single HD. The difference between partitions on one HD can be in the
> 10-15% or greater range, so if the Leopard OS was on a fast partition
> and the Tiger on a slow partition, the results would be skewed. In
> order to do a valid comparison you'd need to install a clean OS onto
> one HD or partition and run the test; then erase that HD or partition
> and install the other OS onto the SAME HD or partition and rerun the
> test. I believe if you run the tests on IDENTICAL setups you'll see
> that Leopard is 15-20% slower than Tiger.

I agree, in principle, but I have to say, from my own benchmarking
days - back when I did performance evaluation for a living, 13-14y ago
- position of stuff on disk made no measurable difference in tests.
Yes, it's a theoretical factor, but in practice, the difference was
too small to measure. That means, on my old tests, <0.1% difference.

I think perhaps it may be like Windows 7 versus Vista. Win7 has been
heavily tuned for responsiveness and everyone who uses it tends to say
that it *feels* faster than before, but actually, in benchmark tests,
actually Vista tends to win. Benchmarks do not measure how responsive
a system "feels", they measure the raw execution speed of apps or
processes, so they tend to penalise multi-core machines and so on.



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