From: Marcin Wichary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Jayleen sent me this info and I trash everything but didn't help much. I'm beginning to think OS X is just slower than 9. :-(
But it is, isn't it...? Since Mac OS X is much more complicated and has much more to do than OS 9, it will always be slower on a same machine than 9. Or am I missing something...?
I've been puzzling over this for a little while and I think I've figured out what's happening. I thought I had already addressed this to some extent, but there's no harm in repeating myself a little ...
I think the perception that Marcin and others have that OS X is "slower" than OS 9 (native, not Classic) is based on two things:
1. Finder responsiveness. 2. Quartz Extreme or lack thereof.
I'm getting the impression that those among us who find OS X to be perceptibly slower than OS 9 are basing that feeling mostly on the Finder -- how fast windows open and close, etc. If that's the case, then they are NOT imagining things -- OS 9 does *indeed* "feel snappier" than OS X, particularly on machines not capable of taking full advantage of Quartz Extreme. There are lots of gobbledegook reasons for this I won't bother with, but Marcin's perception is basically correct -- the OS X windows have more "to do" than OS 9 windows, and thus move a little less quickly. It's not really the fault of the windows themselves, it's the fault of UNIX. It is by nature a multitasking system and often has LOTS of daemons and other background processes going on, even in a machine that "seems" to be virtually idle. OS 9 did not have this issue and so when a user clicks on a hard drive or folder, the FULL POWER of the processor is instantly devoted to drawing and "opening" the window, and as a result they seem to "snap" open faster. By contrast, even a completely idle Mac running OS X will not devote it's full power to opening a window. There are "renice" utilities you could use to prove this -- they force the computer to devote nearly its' full power to whichever process you specify. Once you set that up and THEN try to open a window or do any kind of Finder operation, you'll see a MARKED improvement in responsiveness -- not that I suggest you actually do this!
I've made extensive timings of my old applications' performance in native OS 9 and Classic, and can assure you that Classic is actually slightly *faster* than native OS 9, and most if not all OS X apps are faster still, at least from 10.3 on. But Finder responsiveness is still something of an issue on machines that can't do Quartz Extreme for the reasons I've outlined above. That's *why* Apple invented Quartz Extreme.
For the benefit of those that don't know, Quartz Extreme is a terminology for a technique used in OS X to offload the graphics work (like drawing windows, updating backgrounds and so on) to the video card. It requires a Radeon-class or better card with 32MB of VRAM (obviously, more brings faster response!). When that's available, the difference in Finder responsiveness is noticeably better because the CPU no longer has to do that work.
The bottom line of this long-winded talk is that EVERY operating system, including OS X, makes choices and compromises in performance in certain areas. Windows is designed to get great performance out of games and mediocre performance out of most everything else. In OS 9, you got more visceral responsiveness, but that's because the computer would focus on one task at a time for the most part. Remember when you would send a file to the printer for printing and the computer could barely do ANYTHING else till that job was done? The old OS 9 standard for multitasking, called "cooperative" in some circles, was not truly multitasking at all -- it was "I'll do a part of job A, then some of Job B, then back to Job A -- hopefully so quickly that the user thinks it is happening all at the same time."
The designers of OS X (and UNIX before them) decided it would be better if the processor was able to do a lot more, but spread the processing power around a bit differently so that no one item could "take over" all the processing power of the computer. This is "true" aka "preemptive" multitasking -- Job A gets 50% of the processor's power, Job B gets 25% and the system gets the rest. You may not immediately grasp the difference, but basically it means that the computer can handle more powerful tasks all at once without crashing or slowing one of them down to a crawl.
On what I would call "underpowered" OS X machines (and by that I basically mean any G3, or any G4 under 500MHz, or any system that didn't have a 32MB Radeon-class video card or better), the change in "OS philosophy" is more noticeable, but it's kind of a false perception.
Here's a test to prove it: find a FAST modern Mac running OS X that can also boot OS 9 -- say a dual-processor 1GHz G4 tower with plenty of RAM for example. Then do this:
1. Boot into OS 9, and then attempt to do the following all at the same time: Print a long document (no spooling), encode a Quicktime Movie into MPEG-1, import a CD into iTunes2, and play a video on a website. Don't adjust the default RAM allotments for these apps, btw.
2. Now boot into OS X and attempt to do the same thing.
_Chas_
FL-MUG: central Florida's Macintosh User Group. Meetings: second Thursday of the month, 6-9pm, at the Orlando Science Center. http://www.flmug.org
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