[crooner]

Hey, Gang.
I was browsing through the screenshot thread looking at all the cool DT's, seeing how many Haxies and mods are being used and started to wondering...

I use quite a few myself and am well aware that my system is considerably faster when I start up with these items disabled. Sure, the "off the shelf" Aqua/OS X experience isn't as cool, but my Dual 1Ghz Quicksilver definitely has more room to flex its muscles.

Bear in mind that I am NOT one of those Haxies/APE nay-sayers. AFAIC, these folks just don't know how to maintain a stable system.

So, I guess my question is if I am the only one experiencing this (which is just about impossible) and what your thoughts are on the issue of trading performance for a personally customized Mac OS.

Please post your own experiences and opinions.

Thanks.

[fisherKing]

i hate to admit it (and don't admit it to most people...)
but my mac is faster when i disable everything (shapeshifter, mighty mouse, cleardock etc).

still, i NEED those things to be happy, so...worth the tradeoff (and the differences are not profound).

wish the mac, out-of-the-box) offered some of the options we crave.

but thank you! unsanity, themers, rogue amoeba, etc etc

[olorin15]

I have just gone back to plain Aqua on my home iMac 700, and do not see any noticable change in performance ... maybe if I disabled all APEs and other add-ons I'd see something, but a little extra RAM and CPU time eaten by them does not bother me much at all. And my Powerbook G4's 1GHz CPU and 500Mb of RAM is more than enough to handle the extra load. On modern computers, this is not really an issue. Now on my 256MHz Compaq that I had in college it did matter That's why I ran Linux with a lightweight setup, like blackbox or windowmaker or icewm. We've come a long way in a afew years though.

[mrtew]

If you really want to see how much all the stuff you are running all the time is slowing you down create a new user and try launcing Safari or something. It doesn't even take one bounce. That's why the new Macs at the Apple store seem so fast. Nice new clean profiles. I found out I don't need a new computer at all. Silk seems to slow things down the most for me, but I need it more than any hack so I can put up with it!

[smeger]

While coding ShapeShifter, I made a design decision to take a performance hit during application launch at the expense of runtime performance. In other words, I designed SS so that it would require longer application launch times, but in exchange, would only minimally impact applications that had already been launched. The alternative was to keep apps launching quickly, but make them slow down as they're running.

I figure a one-time hit is a lot better than a constant hit, especially because on OS X, most people tend to leave their running apps running, rather that quitting 'em and relaunching 'em all the time as they did on OS 9.

Subjective performance is a tricky issue for a few reasons. For one, when you reboot, everything is faster because virtual memory and various caches have been cleared. Your computer slows down slightly as it runs - it doesn't keep slowing down indefinitely, but it gets slightly slower than when it was first rebooted. So you might turn off enhancements, reboot, and think "wow, this is way faster!" when in reality, you haven't actually gained that much.

Safari, in addition, has an issue where the more sites you've visited, the slower it gets. I think this is due to the way that favicons are cached by Safari. Lots of other apps have similar issues. The result is that when you create a new user, you'll generally see improved performance, even if you DO add in enhancements like ShapeShifter. Think about it - at a minimum, when Safari launches, it needs to parse out its stored bookmarks and favicons. If there aren't any at all, that'll be pretty fast. If there are thousands (and there WILL be thousands of saved favicons on a typical computer), it'll be a lot slower.

Also, if you're using FileVault (like me) and then create another user that doesn't use it, you'll be surprised at the change in performance between the two.

Anyway, back to what I know about - ShapeShifter adds time to application launches. On my 1.25GHz machine, this time tended to be in somewhere around 100 milliseconds during testing - a tenth of a second. On my old 500MHz G3, back in the SS 1.0 days, it was also around 100 milliseconds. The change is partially because themes have gotten more complex since then and partially because I've improved the performance since then. Once applications have finished launching, most applications show negligible performance change. Applications that spend lots of their time opening and closing files will be impacted the most, but that code path in SS is seriously optimized, and in my testing, the impact is still negligible. (Negligible means "I can't tell any difference at all").

Oh, one other thing to think about - lots of stuff (like ShapeShifter, Mighty Mouse, and WindowShade X, for example), use daemon processes. These are tiny applications that have no user interface. You might think that these would impact your performance, since they're always running, but generally speaking, they don't - at all. They only "do something" periodically, and when they're idle, they don't use any CPU at all, and the memory they use tends to get paged out to virtual memory, resulting in a net zero change in performance.

To sum up - on my development machine, I've got a few other users I log in as periodically to test various localizations. They're all pretty bare-bones, but have stuff like ShapeShifter and Mighty Mouse installed. Whenever I log in as one of those other users, I'm always amazed at the performance gain I get, but most of it isn't a result of not running Haxies (since they're running 'em), but just a result of a pristine user account and no File Vault.

Hope this clears things up a bit!

[NetworkShadow]

Only barley noticeable on my 1.25 GHz G4... It's worth it though.
Great post smeger.

[bluevertical]

speed difference is there... but very little... and i can't live w/o my themes...

[crooner]

Wow. Thanks for taking the time to post, Smeger (and everyone else!). I think we all benefit from what you have to say.

The message I seem to be getting from everyone is pretty much the conclusion I have come to... yeah, there is a noticeable (however slight it may be in some cases) performance hit when lots of extras are used (both GUI and other) but this hit is worth the extra functionality and, ultimately, fun they provide.

I see a kind of correlation between what was once the escalation in rows of extensions loading in Mac OS 9 and what we see now in the new, ever-growing rows of third party System Preferences. In any case, I appreciate everyone's input and look forward to seeing some more from those who have yet to chime in.

Perhaps some might offer opinions on what extra applications do inhibit performance the most. (FWIW, I have never really considered SS to be a performance hog. I may have noticed the application launch time issue Smeger alludes to, but that�s about it.)

Here's a good question... how many items are listed in your main account's startup items? I've got 20.

[mugget]

i do notice a small speed increase when i turn everything off, and go back to Aqua.

i've got 12 Start-up Items. that's not too much i guess... but i's all little apps like BuddyPop, MenuCalendarClock, Konfabulator, QuickSilver etc. those slow the startup time more than anything else.

but i've got a feeling that it's not just apps, and extras that slow down your system. when you create a new account, sure you've got none of those extra little apps, but you've also got a cleaner home folder. right now, i don't know how many useless preferences just sitting in ~/Library. and all the other clutter than ends up on your boot volume. is there any way to cleaer out those un-used preference files? i'm sure that would go a long way towards speeding things up...

[budakhan mp]

I've noticed very little performance hits when using haxies, especially Shapeshifter. For what it does though, I'd put up with a slight performance decreae anyway, just can't be without SS.

Like smeger said above, I have my apps open for long periods of time, and launch times aren't a concern for me; but I'm glad to hear that he has taken this route rather than letting an app's performance degrade ove rtime due to a haxie.