[harrisjamieh]

So I got a bit bored today, and decided to see how far my iMac could really go. So I put 99% of the apps in my applications folder into the dock, and as quickly as I could, clicked on each icon to open the app.

Overall, there were 40 apps I told it to launch. Personally I would have been impressed if it managed to launch them all without locking up the system totally, and if it did manage that, I would not have expected the launching to be finished with 15 minutes.

So my first surprise was when the system finished launching all the apps, without crashing. I then looked at the stop watch, and it read 7 minutes and 21 seconds! WOW! 40 apps in under 8 minutes, now thats amazing!

BUT, whats more, is that once the apps were open, the system was still responsive! I was in GarageBand, putting together loads of audio clips from the loops library, and, of course it was slower than normal, but still VERY responsive!

This really shows how awesome this iMac is!

Here is the list of apps I launched. Apps running in Rosetta due to PowerPC build are in bold

Safari
Mail
iTunes
iWeb
iMovie
Photoshop CS2
Mercury Messenger
Pages
Macromedia Fireworks
Macromedia Dreamweaver
Macromedia Flash
VLC Player
Text Edit
System Preferences
Stickies
Soundtrack (old version running in Rosetta)
Sherlock
Skype
Quicktime
Q (windows emulator, actually running XP during this test)
Preview
Limewire
iSync
iPhoto
Internet Explorer
Internet Connect
Image Capture
iLinkPod
Handbrake
iCal
gDisk
GarageBand
Font Book
Comic Life
Chess
Automator
Address Book
Dictionary
Calculator
Open Office (with X11)


Thats 40 apps!

Just a points of reference, I tried reopening a few apps once all 40 were open (by closing the app then reopening), and here are the results:

Mail opened in 3 bounces
Safari in 2 bounces
iWeb in 6 (with an 8 page site to load)

This is pretty remarkable IMO.

Just thought I share my pointless antics with you

(iMac specs in sig)

Couple of screenshots:
[removed oversize images --tooki]

[cambro]

Gotta love modern memory management....

Hilarious exposé shot by the way...

[2009059]

Did the same with my Power Mac, only 110 apps. It was fun. Not really responsive after that, like you could type and stuff but expose lagged.

[harrisjamieh]

lol, I haven't got 110 apps to do it with, 40 is basically all I have hehe. Yeh, expose was laggy, but I guess it can be expected.

[demibob]

it takes about 8 minuits to start up garageband or virtual pc on my g4 by themselves. How times have changed.
Still its not like all those applications were actualy doing stuff at the same time. How much ram does your imac have

[demibob]

never mind i just saw your sig

[mduell]

*yawn* This would be impressive (read: impossible) 10 years ago on Win95 or OS8. Ever since the turn of the century it's rather ho-hum.

[harrisjamieh]

Originally Posted by mduell

*yawn* This would be impressive (read: impossible) 10 years ago on Win95 or OS8. Ever since the turn of the century it's rather ho-hum.

I wouldn't quite say that, it would be near impossible for win95 or os 8 to have 40 programs running at once, not nessasarily coz of the OS, but because of the hardware available at the time.

There is no way that my P4 2.66 HT Ghz/512 RAM I used to have would have managed this, so personally I think its pretty impressive. I know my iBook certainly wouldnt manage it..

[Dumbo]

I think it's mainly demonstrating the powerful OS. Mac OS X and Linux can handle something like this.

Windows can't. Its multitasking and mem management sucks so bad, I wouldn't even try it on an XP machine.

[Pierre B.]

Originally Posted by mduell

*yawn* This would be impressive (read: impossible) 10 years ago on Win95 or OS8. Ever since the turn of the century it's rather ho-hum.

What are you talking about? I am right now on an old Wallstreet Powerbook under OS 9, with only 384 MB of RAM. I tried something similar and I stoped when I reached 30 applications, because all the RAM had been eaten alive (virtual memory is off). However the system did not crash, but it did have screen redraw issues because there was no RAM available. The applications that I opened included some "heavy" ones for this machine, like old versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, graphics manipulation and archiving programs, web browsers etc. And it took about 7-8 minutes to do so, with the time to locate in the hard drive the applications. I am pretty sure that with virtual memory turned on (to allocate for example 1 GB of memory), even this machine could handle 40 or more applications.

What I try to say. A test like that, that is, just launching applications and let them sit there doing nothing, says almost nothing about the performance of the machine. The difference becomes visible when you actually put these applications to work and the CPU receives serious stress. In this case, the Wallstreet I tried would very easily crash. Not to talk about CPU performance. The Intel iMac on the other hand will really show its muscle in such a test (parallel processing).

[eddiecatflap]

and as apps / the os get finely tuned for the intel architecture , things can only improve - dramatically !!

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Dumbo

Windows can't. Its multitasking and mem management sucks so bad, I wouldn't even try it on an XP machine.

Spoken like a troll. On comparable hardware to the OP's iMac, WinXP can easily run 40 apps and remain responsive.

Originally Posted by Pierre B.

What are you talking about? I am right now on an old Wallstreet Powerbook under OS 9, with only 384 MB of RAM. I tried something similar and I stoped when I reached 30 applications, because all the RAM had been eaten alive (virtual memory is off). However the system did not crash, but it did have screen redraw issues because there was no RAM available. The applications that I opened included some "heavy" ones for this machine, like old versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, graphics manipulation and archiving programs, web browsers etc. And it took about 7-8 minutes to do so, with the time to locate in the hard drive the applications. I am pretty sure that with virtual memory turned on (to allocate for example 1 GB of memory), even this machine could handle 40 or more applications.

What I try to say. A test like that, that is, just launching applications and let them sit there doing nothing, says almost nothing about the performance of the machine. The difference becomes visible when you actually put these applications to work and the CPU receives serious stress. In this case, the Wallstreet I tried would very easily crash. Not to talk about CPU performance. The Intel iMac on the other hand will really show its muscle in such a test (parallel processing).

I guess you missed the "remaining responsive" part of the OP.

[Dumbo]

Originally Posted by mduell

On comparable hardware to the OP's iMac, WinXP can easily run 40 apps and remain responsive.

Spoken like somebody who's never used XP before. The only 40 apps Win can run at the same time are 40 instances of NotePad. And even then its GUI responsiveness will slow down to a crawl.

@ XP

[jamil5454]

I think the main difference between memory management in XP and OS X manifests itself when you've got a program with a bad memory leak or a processor and/or memory hog.

For instance, I left BitTorrent running on my XP machine overnight and by morning it had consumed all RAM and was using 100% CPU. I noticed it immediately and it took forever to open Task Manager, quit BitTorrent, and then wait for XP to regain the eaten RAM. I gave up and restarted. This is on an Athlon 64 2800+ with 1GB RAM.

On the other hand, every time a process went out of control on my PowerMac G5 (utilizing both 100% CPU and 100% RAM), I never noticed until I had to do something processor intensive. The system still remained responsive enough for me to easily kill the rogue process. This happened quite frequently since I'm a novice Cocoa programmer and I always managed to get stuck in infinite redraw loops. OS X didn't care, as soon as my app wasn't in focus, it gave a higher priority to anything else I was doing.

I might be making a fool out of myself for "not doing my homework", but in my experience this is the main difference between OS X and XP memory management. OS X really shines when the system is heavily stressed.

[macboy]

Originally Posted by Dumbo

Spoken like somebody who's never used XP before. The only 40 apps Win can run at the same time are 40 instances of NotePad. And even then its GUI responsiveness will slow down to a crawl.

@ XP

True dat