[besson3c]

What is the technical reason for why all OS virtualizing apps on the Mac, apps like Flash (both the app itself and its player/plug), and many games are so damn slow? I haven't spent a lot of time web browsing under Windows or Linux, but it seems to me that I can have far more pages open before my browser starts to yak in these OSes - especially if some of these pages contain Flash applets. So, perhaps you can add web browsers to the list of offenders here too...

You might say that these versions aren't very optimized, but I would think that the least optimized of all these apps would be the Linux versions, no? Yet in these areas, the Linux apps trounce the Mac apps in performance even run under one of the bulkiest window managers (Gnome/KDE).

I'm inclined to think that OS X in general still isn't terribly well optimized. It seems to require far more RAM than other OSes, and seems far more resource hungry (I have 1.5 gig of RAM on this machine too). However, what about all of those Photoshop bakeoffs? Does the Mac version of Photoshop still beat the Windows version? If so, perhaps this blows my theory out the the water...

Part of the slowness may be perception. If it takes Photoshop longer to launch and become responsive after doing stuff yet performs filters faster, perhaps there is a sort of skewed net effect?

What is your experience? Do Mac versions of many apps just feel sluggish and bloated to you? If so, why is this? Does your gut tell you that OS X is as optimized as it can be, or do you feel that Apple's developers have been rather lazy in getting around to performance optimizations? Does this ever get to the point where it bothers you?

[mduell]

Virtualization apps are always slower than native. It was particularly bad in the PPC days when they also needed to do emulation but these days they should be on par with the Windows/Linux virtualization apps.
Flash is a weird one; I've never understood how it could perform so poorly. Perhaps Adobe started it with a very old toolkit/API and a few poor programming choices and never decided it was worth the effort to bring it into the 21st century.
Games are usually written for Windows and then ported to OS X, so they may be doing some emulation of DX calls into OGL and not heavily optimized (particularly when running on PPC).

Other issues are drivers and OS design tradeoffs. With the same hardware and same game (even a game from a developer firmly behind OS X), Windows is usually at least 10% faster than OS X. I'd attribute that to video drivers and the graphics framework. OS X seems to have particularly heavy threads, which leads to things like poor MySQL performance.

/Asbestos underwear on
//MacNN needs more fark slashies
///Slashin it up

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Virtualization apps are always slower than native. It was particularly bad in the PPC days when they also needed to do emulation but these days they should be on par with the Windows/Linux virtualization apps.

They most definitely aren't, even under Linux. Even the open source Virtualbox (which I believe is based on Qemu) absolutely blows VMWare for OS X out of the water in terms of performance, and it is my understanding that VMWare runs Windows faster than Parallels.

Flash is a weird one; I've never understood how it could perform so poorly. Perhaps Adobe started it with a very old toolkit/API and a few poor programming choices and never decided it was worth the effort to bring it into the 21st century.
Games are usually written for Windows and then ported to OS X, so they may be doing some emulation of DX calls into OGL and not heavily optimized (particularly when running on PPC).

Other issues are drivers and OS design tradeoffs. With the same hardware and same game (even a game from a developer firmly behind OS X), Windows is usually at least 10% faster than OS X. I'd attribute that to video drivers and the graphics framework. OS X seems to have particularly heavy threads, which leads to things like poor MySQL performance.

/Asbestos underwear on
//MacNN needs more fark slashies
///Slashin it up

Thanks for this, I appreciate it... I know we won't come to definitive answers here, this is simply exploratory