Mac OS X Performance?

[jhubert]

During Steve Jobs keynote Phil Shiller attempted to show off the performance of OS X with a demo of Quake IIII arena. As we all know it never happened. Did this demo ever happen on the show floor or in the Apple theater at MacWorld? Also, does anyone have any idea how much of a performance increase is gained in OS X over OS 9? I remember some impressive estimates being thrown around back when OS X was just an idea and was wondering if this OS X actually delivers?

[lwpeng]

Here is an educated guess....

I would like to think that (at least for general purpose work) OS X should show significant performance improvements. Especially as you try do to more things at the "same" time.

Since the core services are built on BSD, you figure the task scheduling, virtual memory, etc, are vastly improved over current Mac OS.

Perhaps (although I would need to try it out) is that if you have a single application that you need/want to run, but have background apps open, you might see performance slightly dropping. However, I wonder that since UNIX is so much more efficient at the low level, then maybe processes which are just idling can be paged out by the VM system--rather than continually sucking up system resources.

And then of course OS X is not supposed to be bogged down by 68K code either.

Another way I look at it (again for general purpose work) is with OS X Server. Now yes the UI is clumsy, and current Mac OS is hosted as a UNIX process (rather than an equal partner). But I typically ran Mac OS 8.X/9 in the classic environment (Blue Box) using a disk image, and then starting up about 800 MB (yes, 800) worth of apps--Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Director, LabVIEW, MatLab, PageMaker, SimpleText, QuickTime Player, etc.
Performance "felt" to me like 85-90% of standalone Mac for each app, and switching among Mac apps did not require much waiting. This of course is not any kind of scientific benchmark, but it gave me good hope that Mac users are going to be able to do some pretty amazing things that the current OS hinders.

Larry

[jhubert]

I remember speaking with a Next employee back when Apple first bought the company and he told me that the next OS would be 400 to 600% faster on a PPC chip than the current MacOS was back then. This is before the days of the G3/G4 PPC chip and before OS X was even conceived. It will be interesting to see how fast this new OS really is on a 400 mhz G4 this summer when it ships.

I would imagine that the OS will take full advantage of the Vector Engine in the G4. Steve said during his keynote that they had a gigaflop to work with and that is why OS X with the AQUA UI looked and worked so well in his demo.

[Kam Lion]

How anyone can tell about Mac OS X performance. By just watching the demo I can say that the system is super-responsive and super fast.
For instance, Aqua the new graphical user interface takes full advantage of Quartz with on-the-fly rendering, anti-aliasing, compositing and built-in transparency. This is a realtime graphics engin built into Mac OS X. OGL applications will run even faster than on any other computer platform. For your knowledge Darwin kernel support real time streams thanks to its realtime kernel.

[lwpeng]

I guess the first tests will be with the upcoming developer beta 3 at the end of this month/early February.

Then you figure there will be a wider variety of reports of developers trying out the system on a wider variety of configs.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the dev beta 3 builds show any optimizations for G4/AltiVec yet. I also will not be surprised that even if beta 3 seems quick, that it has a large amount of debugging code in it which will be taken out when the commercial release hits the streets.

You figure that at the tradeshow demos, Apple will use one of its higher end configs. This is not peculiar to Apple, this is standard industry practice.

However, in any case whether it be G3 or G4, I expect the overall performance to "feel" much better to the user.

So I will patiently wait for my copy of dev beta 3!

Larry

[scott]

In theory, Mac OS X should be significantly faster than Mac OS 9 on newer hardware. The core Mac OS X architecture is just more efficient and robust than Mac OS 9 in so many ways that I don't know where to start. If nothing else, consider that the operating system is abstracted from the hardware, so that there's no 68k code running.

Everything in Mac OS 9 is industrial strength: memory subsystems, multitasking. Mac OS X is a "real" OS by even the biggest anti-Mac person's standards. RAM allocation and virtual memory just work and are very efficient. There's no user interaction required. There is essentially unlimited memory available to the user.

Prepare to be blown away by Mac OS X performance.

- Scott


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Scott Stevenson
Associate Editor,
MacNN

[beverson]

I'm really excited about OS X, and I really hope everything that you guys have said about performance is true, but in the back of my mind I can't help but be wary that it might bog down my machine.

I remember back in the day when I upgraded to the brand-new OS 8 on my Performa 6200, and while I liked the new features, I took a big perfomance hit over whatever version of System 7 I upgraded from (7.5? .6?). I now have a Rev. B iMac with 96 MB of RAM, which is just slightly above what Apple says is the BASE requirement for running X in it's current incarnation. Because of this, I'm worried about another performance hit -- I can afford the new OS, but I can't afford to buy a whole new computer to run it, as much as I'd love to do that.

Please tell me my fears are unfounded.

[Scott_H]

Hi,

I think the memory req's will depend on how "Caronized" your applications are. You may want to hold off on OS X until you can get updates/Cocoa versions.

I think memory, how much you have, is the real issue. You can get more but I bet 96 is plenty.

Scott H.

[Orbit]

An application is either Carbonized, or it's not. There is not "half and half"... if it's not complely carbon compliant, it must be run under the "classic" API which is basically a Mac OS 8/9x virtual machine running like an application on top of OS X. Mind you, it's not emulation, since it's all binary compatible w/ the PPC, but there is an additional layer of hardware abstraction when running classic apps, which makes them *slightly* slower than running from the real OS. This, however, might be changed in the final release.

As far as memory management goes, you are unlikely to entirely run out of memory at any point, unless your physical RAM is all used up as well as all your hard disk space. OS X hands each application a large chunk of useable memory addresses which it then manages and handles dynamically. No app can use memory space not assigned to it, but the amount of space it is assigned can be dynamically increased or decreased by the system. All Classic apps run in their own "classic" memory space, which means they can bring each other down, but not the rest of the Carbon/Cocoa apps running on the system. The worst that should happen is a restart of the Classic environment.

Pair all this with the fact that the entire OS is PPC native and optimized for current (ie last 1.5yrs) Apple hardware, and even the base configuration should have no problem at all running OS X. In my opinion, they kind of raised the "minimum configuration" bar a a little high just in case, but older systems than the iMac should be able to run it just fine.

[Orbit]

An application is either Carbonized, or it's not. There is not "half and half"... if it's not complely carbon compliant, it must be run under the "classic" API which is basically a Mac OS 8/9x virtual machine running like an application on top of OS X. Mind you, it's not emulation, since it's all binary compatible w/ the PPC, but there is an additional layer of hardware abstraction when running classic apps, which makes them *slightly* slower than running from the real OS. This, however, might be changed in the final release.

As far as memory management goes, you are unlikely to entirely run out of memory at any point, unless your physical RAM is all used up as well as all your hard disk space. OS X hands each application a large chunk of useable memory addresses which it then manages and handles dynamically. No app can use memory space not assigned to it, but the amount of space it is assigned can be dynamically increased or decreased by the system. All Classic apps run in their own "classic" memory space, which means they can bring each other down, but not the rest of the Carbon/Cocoa apps running on the system. The worst that should happen is a restart of the Classic environment.

Pair all this with the fact that the entire OS is PPC native and optimized for current (ie last 1.5yrs) Apple hardware, and even the base configuration should have no problem at all running OS X. In my opinion, they kind of raised the "minimum configuration" bar a a little high just in case, but older systems than the iMac should be able to run it just fine.

[Scott_H]

Hi,

Yes I know all about Carbon. Poor wording on my part. What I meant was if you take the sum total of all the application and X% were carbon and (100-X)% were not then that "how carbonized" you are. If 100% of the applications are cardonized then you'll be well off. If 0% then you're in Classic land.


Scott H.