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NathanA · Aug 30, 2002, 01:22 PM

Myself and my housemate have recently installed Jaguar. I'm running it on my Dual 500 G4 with 640 Megs of RAM and a Radeon 8500. My housemate is running it on his new TiBook 800 with 512 Megs of RAM.

Here's what I've noticed. Tasks that appear to be drive I/O intensive are MUCH more taxing on the systems responsiveness and performance than before. The places where this is most evident are in OS responsiveness, VirtualPC performance, and iTunes importing performance.

So far as OS performance, when there's a lot of disk accessing going on my system is significantly more prone to stuttering. iTunes will skip, or dragging a window will be jittery, or switching between open apps is delayed a bit where it used to be instantaneos.

With VirtualPC it's really evident that perfomance is much degraded by comparison to 10.1.5, Windows VM scheme accesses the HD a lot despite how much RAM you have allocated to it. With all that disk reading and writing go on the VirtualPC application becomes VERY unresponsive and the Windows evironment starts to crawl along at a snails pace.

iTunes now imports much slower on my machine. Where I used to get about 12 to 14 times encoding now I only get about 8 to 9 times. And while the importing is going on my machine is much more suseptable to stuttering and lagging.

All these things point me back to that somehow the ATA drivers for 10.2 now require a lot more CPU overhead, or generate too many unneeded interrupts, or something else has broken. But typical performance on my machine has gotten worse, and the performance of my housemates brand new TiBook 800 has gotten worse as well.

-Nathan

P.S. this is something I posted over at the AYM forums as well but I wanted to see if a larger group of people could concur with my findings.

Here's a link to the original. Oh and excuse teh typos, but they're in the original too so I wanted to be true to form

daimoni · 02:53 AM

.

CheesePuff · Aug 30, 2002, 01:33 PM

Originally posted by NathanA:
Myself and my housemate have recently installed Jaguar. I'm running it on my Dual 500 G4 with 640 Megs of RAM and a Radeon 8500. My housemate is running it on his new TiBook 800 with 512 Megs of RAM.

Here's what I've noticed. Tasks that appear to be drive I/O intensive are MUCH more taxing on the systems responsiveness and performance than before. The places where this is most evident are in OS responsiveness, VirtualPC performance, and iTunes importing performance.

So far as OS performance, when there's a lot of disk accessing going on my system is significantly more prone to stuttering. iTunes will skip, or dragging a window will be jittery, or switching between open apps is delayed a bit where it used to be instantaneos.

With VirtualPC it's really evident that perfomance is much degraded by comparison to 10.1.5, Windows VM scheme accesses the HD a lot despite how much RAM you have allocated to it. With all that disk reading and writing go on the VirtualPC application becomes VERY unresponsive and the Windows evironment starts to crawl along at a snails pace.

iTunes now imports much slower on my machine. Where I used to get about 12 to 14 times encoding now I only get about 8 to 9 times. And while the importing is going on my machine is much more suseptable to stuttering and lagging.

All these things point me back to that somehow the ATA drivers for 10.2 now require a lot more CPU overhead, or generate too many unneeded interrupts, or something else has broken. But typical performance on my machine has gotten worse, and the performance of my housemates brand new TiBook 800 has gotten worse as well.

-Nathan

P.S. this is something I posted over at the AYM forums as well but I wanted to see if a larger group of people could concur with my findings.

Here's a link to the original. Oh and excuse teh typos, but they're in the original too so I wanted to be true to form

Try another install.

Little Newton · Aug 30, 2002, 01:36 PM

You know, honestly, my system is running much better under 10.2 than 10.1.5. Can the disc access problem you refer be related to prebinding in the background that someone else refered to?

iTunes skipping is just unheard of on my QS733 under any version of X.....ever

Ripping is as good as ever but not any better.

The overall feel is very smooth and useable...I do not get ahead of the computer like I did under 9 and 10.0.

Regards

PubGuy · Aug 30, 2002, 01:41 PM

I agree with Nathan. I've also installed 10.2 on G4-400 AGP with 1G memory and an iMac G4-700 with 768 M memory.

The "sluggishness" or "stickyness" is noticable at times, especially in mouse responsiveness (there have been other posts here regard the mouse responsiveness).

It have nothing to do with the "install", not when this is occurring on multiple systems with different configurations. And he's right, VPC is so jittery it is frustrating. This is all new since the 10.2 install.

Overall, yes, 10.2 is faster. But you you are doing drive intensive things that tax the system, the hit it places on the user interface is unacceptable....especially when this did not occur in 10.1.5.

NathanA · Aug 30, 2002, 01:53 PM

Originally posted by PubGuy:
I agree with Nathan. I've also installed 10.2 on G4-400 AGP with 1G memory and an iMac G4-700 with 768 M memory.

The "sluggishness" or "stickyness" is noticable at times, especially in mouse responsiveness (there have been other posts here regard the mouse responsiveness).

It have nothing to do with the "install", not when this is occurring on multiple systems with different configurations. And he's right, VPC is so jittery it is frustrating. This is all new since the 10.2 install.

Overall, yes, 10.2 is faster. But you you are doing drive intensive things that tax the system, the hit it places on the user interface is unacceptable....especially when this did not occur in 10.1.5.

Yeah exactly.

I'm glad to see I'm not crazy. And it really seems like the problems persist most under high I/O load. With 10.1.5 under high I/O load things just took a long time, but they didn't make the rest of my usage of the system seem degraded in any way. Now under high I/O load which can result from using an App that is constantly accessing the CD drive like iTunes or the HD like VPC or simply just launching a couple programs at the same time, the system starts to sputter and stutter. It's irritating since it didn't happen under 10.1.5. The whole advantage of MacOS X over OS 9 to me was the fact that I could do 10 things at a time with no perceivable performance hiccups, it really feels like I've gone back to the world of OS 9 where I have to be a lot more careful about how many and what things I try to do concurrently. If this issue doesn't get resolved in the near future then I'm going to have to go back to 10.1.5 to get my workflow back, because the fact that 10.2 seems faster at doing a single task or two just tells me that they traded multi-tasking smoothness for increased priority for processes and espeicially I/O bound processes. That's just not acceptable for me. If I wanted to use an OS that jittered, stuttered, and sputtered everytime I did a few semi-taxing things at the same time I'd just use WindowsXP.

-Nathan

euphras · Aug 30, 2002, 02:25 PM

Make a backup of your data (mp3s

), erase HD, make a clean install with at least two partitions (system and data) and you�ll notice a speed increase....

Pat

absmiths · Aug 30, 2002, 02:36 PM

I haven't had any noticeable problems other than initial install stuff. I did a format and clean install with both of my machines, a Beige G3/300 and a Ti/667. The beige is just as slow as ever, but much happier. My TI looks tremendous now and runs a lot better overall. I use make and ant and all kinds of things at once and I don't notice the machine becoming unusable. What do you really want the OS to do when you launch multiple apps at once? If the OS optimizes launch time, then people complain that the CPU is stolen from the UI - if however it optimizes the UI then people publish bounce-marks and complain that it takes too long for OmniWeb to launch.

At any rate, your dual G4/500 should be light years beyond my G3/300 - and I haven't noticed any degradation.

KidRed · Aug 30, 2002, 03:17 PM

So things are amazingly fast. Others are down right annoyingly slow. Switching from an app or finder to photoshop gives my the SCROD for at least 5 seconds now. With a newsreader downloading some binaries and then trying to work in another app (on my dual gig) it's like one processor isn't being used it's so slow. Contexual menus from the dock also suck ass.

Start up rocks and there is noticeable improvements here and there but I have a few issues with speed and sleep no longer works and screen cap combinations don't either.

Zimphire · Aug 30, 2002, 03:27 PM

I am glad I am not having any of these problems.

silverghost · Aug 30, 2002, 04:09 PM

Thats strange alls well here, but with vpc open on a pismo and on a dual gig you can hear my hard drives churning away, I wonder if its vpc's fault.Oh well ill just keep vpc off till an update.
By the way I usually keep photoshop,flash,dreamweaver,fireworks,freehand,ter minal,mail,address book,and a couple of web browsers open with no ill effects but I will concur that with vpc open both my machines slowdown and I can hear a lot of hard-drive noise.

aloha

snerdini · Aug 30, 2002, 04:31 PM

The only time I really have any type of a slow-down is when I am paging in or out to disk, heavily. If you have enough RAM, I don't think you should be experiencing those types of slow-downs. And in my experience, when ANY OS is hitting the hard drive heavily, you will lose responsiveness.

MartiNZ · Aug 30, 2002, 04:33 PM

All I've noticed that is a step down from 10.1.5 is the fact that the finder now crashes, seemingly randomly, while doing seemingly simple things like moving things between two open windows. This never happened to me in 10.1.x but has already happened 4 times in the 5 days I've had Jaguar

!

I'm not sure if it's to do with the new 'multithreading' - I can crash while you keep working

- or with the implementation of spring loaded folders - or even changing desktop pictures.. or if it's just me...

lookmark · Aug 30, 2002, 04:40 PM

There are some issues with VPC and 10.2. It's very slow, and an update is forthcoming.

Check the discussion boards at Connectix or the Macintouch 10.2 Report for details.

IonCable · Aug 30, 2002, 04:59 PM

Well I got Jag on a TiBook 667 DVI with 512 Ram. I see it as being more responsive and stable. Notice, I said responsive. I haven't noticed a "speed" difference the performing operations but the system is much more responsive. As in the desktop updates faster when I download files and unstuff them, or copy a large number of files the dialog appears and updates in near real-time. I have had no Finder Crashes, some older apps have crashed. Omniweb is particular is giving me fits. My iTunes no longer studders like it did under 10.1.5. I was using iChat, compling an app in ProjectBuilder, listening to iTunes and doing some lite surfing with out a single studder.

I did an archive and install. All the people I have talk to with troubles seem to have some "haxies", mods on the system or older app running in the background. Although the update is only a .1 version change the amount changed in massive. I think alot of apps will need patches to function at 100%.

juanvaldes · Aug 30, 2002, 05:34 PM

I disagree but I have found when I'm all out of RAM (only got 256 now) changing volume can take ages upwards of 20 seconds.

Anomalous · Aug 30, 2002, 05:42 PM

10.2 is not any slower than 10.1.x on my iMac DV, but it is not really faster either. It does seem slightly more efficient overall because of the decrease in spinning beach balls. But from what I had read, I thought it might be faster than it turned out to be.

BTP · Aug 30, 2002, 05:50 PM

Can't say the same here. Any of you with issues, what kind of install did you do?

I did an upgrade only and 10.2 is easily faster than 10.1, leaps and bounds faster for me.

My guess would be that there is an issue that you haven't found yet since you seem to be the exception, than the rule.

I will also suggest a clean install if things are that bad for you.

KidRed · Aug 30, 2002, 05:55 PM

I did an install first. I had the sleep issues, loss of screen cap commands and strange ghosts on desktop icons. So I re-installed doing the archive method and it only fixed the ghosts, I still have no sleep, no screen capture access and switching apps (mainly PS) brings the SCROD out big time.

Love Calm Quiet · Aug 30, 2002, 06:05 PM

It's amazing how varied the experiences are.

As a result, I'm still lurking on the sidelines before trusting my work to Jag.

Has anyone checked to see if MacJanitor works okay with Jag? And whether it'll smoothe out any of the processes (other than VPC)? [ It seems to help a lot of finder and IE sluggishness that develops over course of the day in 10.1.5. ]

El Pre$idente · Aug 30, 2002, 06:18 PM

Originally posted by KidRed:
I did an install first. I had the sleep issues, loss of screen cap commands and strange ghosts on desktop icons. So I re-installed doing the archive method and it only fixed the ghosts, I still have no sleep, no screen capture access and switching apps (mainly PS) brings the SCROD out big time.

Nice to see you suffering after all these months cursing me for having problems.

mmintler · Aug 30, 2002, 06:31 PM

I'm not sure what is "special" about my system-I have a G4 450 and it was soooo sluggish with 10.1. After installing Jaguar my machine feels like a new one again. I was condsidering upgrading the processor but I'm not sure it's necessary now. With VPC the restore state is done in 1/3 the time. My un-scientific guesstimate would be that I'm seeing at least a 20% speed increase in system resonsiveness.

superfula · Aug 30, 2002, 06:47 PM

Well I can honestly say I have had nothing bad happen with Jaguar. No crashes, no kernal panics, no mouse stutters. Nothing. Just some programs here and there that didn't work with the update. Most have gotten updates so they work great now. I am very pleased with 10.2 100%

1) It is noticably faster in everything
2) VPC runs much faster for me. It's actually functional now. If I minimize it, I don't even notice it running. Only have 250 MB ram preferenced for VPC.
3) using photoshop or any heavy graphics programs causes zero slowdown.

Did a clean install. Running a dual 800 with 1.2 gigs of ram. Just added 512 yesterday, so most of my first impressions were on 768.

Seems like some people have the same experience as me, and others have had troubles. I would say do a clean install. Problems like the mouse stuttering and vpc slowdowns could be fixed with a simple clean install.

::maroma:: · Aug 30, 2002, 06:52 PM

Originally posted by superfula:
Well I can honestly say I have had nothing bad happen with Jaguar. No crashes, no kernal panics, no mouse stutters. Nothing. Just some programs here and there that didn't work with the update. Most have gotten updates so they work great now. I am very pleased with 10.2 100%

1) It is noticably faster in everything
2) VPC runs much faster for me. It's actually functional now. If I minimize it, I don't even notice it running. Only have 250 MB ram preferenced for VPC.
3) using photoshop or any heavy graphics programs causes zero slowdown.

Did a clean install. Running a dual 800 with 1.2 gigs of ram. Just added 512 yesterday, so most of my first impressions were on 768.

Seems like some people have the same experience as me, and others have had troubles. I would say do a clean install. Problems like the mouse stuttering and vpc slowdowns could be fixed with a simple clean install.

My experience has been about the same. Noticeable improvements overall. No weird slowdowns or anything. No mouse jitters, no choppiness. I too did a clean install on a newly formatted drive. I do that with all major upgrades. I would suggest to those having problems to do the same. Yeah, it sucks rebuilding everything, but its worth it in the long run.

-my 2 cents

chris v · Aug 30, 2002, 10:44 PM

I did the upgrade, and launch times on my Cube are significantly slower.

Eudora 10.1=1 bounce; 10.2=5 bounces
Omniweb 10.1=3 bounces; 10.2=7 bounces
Etc, etc.

Terminal takes 5 secs to give me a prompt.
Single-user mode doesn't work.

I REALLY don't feel like wiping my drive and starting over. *sigh*...

CV

nigeljedi · Aug 30, 2002, 10:59 PM

I've noticed a good speed improvement with both my G4 iMac 800 (512MB RAM) and my G3 iBook 500 (320MB RAM). Apps launch quicker, which makes me smile

superfula · Aug 30, 2002, 11:00 PM

Originally posted by chris v:
I did the upgrade, and launch times on my Cube are significantly slower.

Eudora 10.1=1 bounce; 10.2=5 bounces
Omniweb 10.1=3 bounces; 10.2=7 bounces
Etc, etc.

Terminal takes 5 secs to give me a prompt.
Single-user mode doesn't work.

I REALLY don't feel like wiping my drive and starting over. *sigh*...

CV

What are your machine specs?
For me....
Omniweb goes up, then down. is that 1 bounce?
Terminal prompt shows in about a second
Itunes = 1 bounce
Watson = 2 bounces
Mail = 2 bounces

Just so some can compare.

chris v · Aug 30, 2002, 11:14 PM

Originally posted by superfula:

What are your machine specs?
For me....
Omniweb goes up, then down. is that 1 bounce?
Terminal prompt shows in about a second
Itunes = 1 bounce
Watson = 2 bounces
Mail = 2 bounces

Just so some can compare.

Cube 450 896 MB RAM 7200 RPM drive.

The prob. is, Jag (launch times, anyway) is slower than 10.1.5.

CV

Mack · Aug 31, 2002, 12:14 AM

Jaguar is faster for me in all respects. The key, I think, is doing a clean install.

kmkkid · Aug 31, 2002, 12:19 AM

Bah!, just work on a 450 Mhz K6-2 with XP and only 128 MB of RAM for a few days, then tell me what can possibly be slower!?!

(I now hate PC's my Duron 800 has suddenly started freezing randomly b4 and after boot, and I am thinking of getting an imac sooner than I had hoped > : () But I really want to wait till it's 1 Ghz

Chris

Mr. Blur · Aug 31, 2002, 12:31 AM

I did the clean install on both my macs (dual 800 and tibook 550) and both are running faster than with 10.1.5 in all respects, except for VPC as mentioned in other peoples posts...

JoeyA · Aug 31, 2002, 01:32 AM

Originally posted by superfula:

What are your machine specs?
For me....
Omniweb goes up, then down. is that 1 bounce?
Terminal prompt shows in about a second
Itunes = 1 bounce
Watson = 2 bounces
Mail = 2 bounces

Just so some can compare.

I've got a G4 Cube 450 w/ 1 GB Ram, stock 20 GB drive and an OEM GeForce 2 card. I did a clean install on a freshly formatted drive. Here are my results:

Omniweb: 2 bounces
Terminal: 2 bounces
iTunes: 2-3 bounces

I don't use Mail or Watson so I can't compare there. In general I've noticed an ever so slight slowdown since installing Jag on my Cube over 10.1.5. I did, however, get a respectable speed boost on my upgraded iBook 500 w/ 256 MB Ram. Here are bounce results for that system:

Omniweb: 2 bounces
Terminal: 2 bounces
iTunes: 3 bounces

The one thing I have noticed is that my mouse sputters constantly on the Cube and that IE is simply horrible. Page loads are sluggish at best and it takes six seconds (no kidding) to close a window. Simply put, my P100 laptop running Windows 95 offers a better web browsing experience than my cube.

Cipher13 · Aug 31, 2002, 04:15 AM

10.2 is faster for me, by a LONG way.

But I still wouldn't call it "blazing fast".

User interaction in some apps is still just shocking. Last night I just ended up using the XP box on the net; the G4 was just here playing MP3's...

plyxrbo · Aug 31, 2002, 04:50 AM

10.2 is faster for me as well. applications feel more responsive and overall i feel like the system is not as bloated as it used to feel.

while i would not call my install blazingly fast, it is MUCH faster than 10.1.5 ever was. i did an upgrade over 10.1.5 and i have never run any disk optimizers other than the ones present on the install utility.

workerbee · Aug 31, 2002, 05:21 AM

Originally posted by Mack:
Jaguar is faster for me in all respects. The key, I think, is doing a clean install.

Apparently, that is true. My Archive&Install felt noticeably slower than 10.1.x, but now that I did a Wipe & Install -- due to the Finder corrupting my Harddisk -- , my TiBook 800 does feel speedier.

So thats one less argument for the Apple Evangelists around here to use agains Windows ("sure it's fast at the beginning, but wait until you've installed a few apps and it will become slower and slower") ... OSX is, it seems, no better.

HeyAndy · Aug 31, 2002, 09:31 AM

Here's a strange one. A guy I work with and I both have 550mhz TiBooks both have 512MBs of RAM. The only real difference is that I recently dropped a 48GB IBM travelstar HD in mine. We both upgraded to 10.2 from 10.1.5 - not clean installs. My powerbook has been fine. A small, but noticeable increase in performance. The other powerbook is now on its third clean install and has seemed to stop crashing frequently, but is still slower to launch apps (for me address book comes up in 1-2 bounces; for him, 4-5). Granted, the new HD is faster and larger (prob. less fragmented) and would account for faster app launching and memory paging, but when we were in 10.1.5 the difference wasn't this pronounced. Plus, he's still suffering from random crashes. I did have a bit of sluggishness for the first couple of days, but a look at process viewer showed me that for some reason, weatherpop (latest version) was consuming a solid 30-50% of my CPU. Haven't run it since and things are great... I guess it's a good idea to look a little deeper and see if there might be something else misbehaving. It is strange, and a bit disturbing, to see the broad disparity in performance experiences, even on such similar machines.

chabig · Aug 31, 2002, 09:59 AM

I had menu and mouse "stickiness" immediately after my upgrade install. So I rebooted into single-user mode and ran fsck -y. There were a few directory problems, so I ran it until they were all fixed, then rebooted.

Voila! The machine was faster than 10.1.

By the way, other reasons your HD activity might be high:

1. It's content indexing
2. I think Apple Help indexes help files

So over the first several hours, as these tasks finish, your machine should get faster. That's my experience.

Chris

Eddies in the aether · Aug 31, 2002, 10:58 AM

Originally posted by Mack:
Jaguar is faster for me in all respects. The key, I think, is doing a clean install.

I have a GB of RAM on my PB and did a clean install, my experience is like some other posters here, at times Jaguar feels about as responsive as OS9 under a heavy load. This tends to be when downloading with MT-NW while using a browser in the foreground,imho under these conditions Jaguar is worse than OSX10.1.5. VPC is just painful - but turning off PC sound and closing the PC list window helps.