[blueprintllp]

I fired up a friend's old G4 tower about a week ago so another friend could work with it. Firefox is the only application running and it's running very slow. even when the display goes to sleep and the rainbow swirly screen comes up it is choppy... even without any applications running. When my friend clicks on something that takes some memory like a flash game or youtube he gets the spinnywheel of death while the computer works through the request. So, it looks like a memory problem but have been told it could be a graphics card. I'm not sure how to check to see if anything is running in the backgroung. The Mac's specs follow. Any advice would be appreciate. thanks, Jb



Machine Modelower Mac G4 (AGP graphics)
CPU TypeowerPC G4 (2.7)
Number Of CPUs:1
CPU Speed:400 MHz
L2 Cache (per CPU):1 MB
Memory:1 GB
Bus Speed:100 MHz
Boot ROM Version:4.2.8f1

oftware:

System Software Overview:

System Version: Mac OS X 10.3.9 (7W98)
Kernel Version: Darwin 7.9.0
Boot Volume: mac HD
Computer Name: Aditya Nathan’s Computer
User Name: Aditya Nathan (adit)

DIMM0/J21:
Size:512 MB
DIMM1/J22:
Size:256 MB
DIMM2/J23:
Size:256 MB

ADPT,1686806-04:
Name:ADPT,2930CU
Type:scsi
BusCI
Slot:SLOT-D

[Big Mac]

Open up Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities) and look at how much processor utilization there is - is it always at 100% or always less than 5%? Usually slowness indicates a run-away application or process (100% utilization), but sometimes if you see very little utilization that can point to bad RAM. When the third party generic RAM in my iBook spontaneously failed, it was somehow able to still boot but very very slowly. If you know what the processor utilization is, you'll probably be able to figure out what the cause of the slowness is. It shouldn't have anything to do with the GPU, that's for sure. If it were the GPU you'd see slowness in 3D applications, not slowness in general use apps like a web browser.

[reader50]

Also check how much free space the HD has. A browser opens lots of cache files, if the HD is nearly full, then you get a ton of seek times due to the heavy fragmentation.

[mfbernstein]

Flash is slow, period (my 800MHZ G3 has issues with it too). Firefox isn't too fast either. I recommend trying Camino in its stead. The latest beta allows for selectively enabling flash (like Flashblock in Firefox). Activity Monitor will let you both see what other applications may be slowing things down, and whether memory is an issue (the number of swap outs is important, should be low).

[imitchellg5]

A new video card would help with flash. After I got a Radeon 9800 Pro in my 533 MHz G4 it sped way up on sites with Flash. It's now just as fast as our 1.8 GHz G5 browsing the web (I use Camino on the G4, Firefox on the G5).

[reader50]

If the slowdown turns out to be caused by the low clockspeed, you can get G4-optimized compiles of Firefox here.

[mfbernstein]

I'm curious if anybody has actually measured the performance difference between the generic Firefox and the G4 one. I'd be impressed if the difference were more than just noise.