[HWA AFI]

I've been running a mac for 11 months now and I hardly know anything about the OS aside from basic commands and useage. In win XP/2k theres a lot of things you can tweak to speed it up and squeeze that extra little bit of performance out of applications. Are there any performance enhancing tweaks for OS X? I'm running 10.3.9 right now and I haven't been able to find much as far as tweaking OS X to speed it up

[el chupacabra]

It might help if you post what specifically you tweak in windows and we may be able to tell you the corresponding solution in OS X. Many of the things in Windows that people 'tweak' don't need to be tweaked in OS X, as the OS most of the time can 'tweak' itself.

[jamil5454]

Set your processor performance to "Highest" in the Energy Saver settings.

[HWA AFI]

Done that... I'm just looking for anything I can edit to make this thing faster.

[chabig]

That's about all you can do.

[msuper69]

Get Tiger.

[dru]

What do you find "slow" and maybe we can go from there...

[Anubis IV]

As per the earlier suggestion, mention some of the things that you did in Windows to get speed improvements and we might be able to make suggestions or educate you based on those ideas. Really though, most of the speed improvement tricks you hear about on Mac are either perceived speed improvements (i.e. faster dropdown of those panes like you get when you save files) or on an application basis (i.e. some tweaks to Firefox settings or something like that).

[MacDog]

You can use an application such as Onyx which may help a very little bit.

Turning off File Sharing if you're not using it will help.

Disabling/removing all the foreign fonts from the various Font folders helps apps launch faster.

[Ron Goodman]

You don't say anything about your hardware, but adding more RAM and upgrading to Tiger would be at the top of my list.

[HWA AFI]

As much as I love this mac, it's slow as hell compared to my PC. I even lag typing some times. I maxed the ram at 1.25gb before I even turned it on so that's not a problem. With my PC I have 100% control over my graphics card and sound drivers, CPU and chipset drivers, BIOS settings, and msconfig plus more. The fact that it takes a LONG time to load apps I blame on the slow hdd (should upgrade to a 7200rpm drive...) but after open it lags. firefox and adium typing lags sometimes, especially after in sleep mode. Adium gets brought to it's knees and I'm constantly beach balling when I have an AIM chat room open. I have to restart firefox every few days to get it to stop hanging. Pages that load instantly on my PC take 5 seconds or more to load on my ibook.

Is tiger really faster or what? I might swap out for an 80gb 7200 RPM drive and do a fresh install of tiger... When does 10.5 come out?

[Thinine]

Lagging on that machine is definitely abnormal. What all do you run on it at any one time?

[el chupacabra]

What hardware do you have and what OS version (never mind u said 10.3) are you running on it? If you have a really old computer Tiger might not help. But if your computer really was new 11 months ago it shouldn't be that slow. I'm running OS 10.3 on a 500 mhz G3 and everything works within a second as long I restart it when it gets down to 0kb of disk space.

[HWA AFI]

10.3.9 on a 12" ibook 1.2ghz G4 1.25gb ram 60gb hdd 9200 mobility.

I usually run itunes, firefox, adium, bit torrent, calculator, safari, xirc, text edit, activity monitor, and sometimes iphoto or DVD player. My parents 2500+ barton rig with 512mb ram I made them is 5x faster than this for browsing the internet...

I have 67mb ram free now without xirc. This thing just eats up ram and won't let go of it even after closing an app. I had 600mb of ram free when I first booted this week but now I have hardly any. Only 245mb of that is active. The rest is "inactive" Apparently my virtual memory size is 4.47gb and I see "used 1.18gb" under inactive in activity monitor. WTF!

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

10.3.9 on a 12" ibook 1.2ghz G4 1.25gb ram 60gb hdd 9200 mobility.

I usually run itunes, firefox, adium, bit torrent, calculator, safari, xirc, text edit, activity monitor, and sometimes iphoto or DVD player. My parents 2500+ barton rig with 512mb ram I made them is 5x faster than this for browsing the internet...

I have 67mb ram free now without xirc. This thing just eats up ram and won't let go of it even after closing an app. I had 600mb of ram free when I first booted this week but now I have hardly any. Only 245mb of that is active. The rest is "inactive" Apparently my virtual memory size is 4.47gb and I see "used 1.18gb" under inactive in activity monitor. WTF!

OS X "eats" RAM because to not use it is to essentially waste it, seeing as loading data from RAM is always faster than loading it from the hard drive. So it will keep data in RAM for as long as possible. The most relevant statistic in terms of performance in Activity Monitor's system memory pane is the pageins/outs figure. Pageouts are when your system is forced to send data from memory to the hard disk. If your pageouts are not significantly lower than your pageins, then you could benefit from more memory.

[wataru]

It doesn't "eat" RAM. Read up on memory management in OS X before getting upset about RAM usage; until you know what it does and why, the numbers look bad.

[HWA AFI]

Ok... 50333/6519 in/out. Still looks bad to me. If I close an app I want it's damn ram back.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

10.3.9 on a 12" ibook 1.2ghz G4 1.25gb ram 60gb hdd 9200 mobility.

I usually run itunes, firefox, adium, bit torrent, calculator, safari, xirc, text edit, activity monitor, and sometimes iphoto or DVD player. My parents 2500+ barton rig with 512mb ram I made them is 5x faster than this for browsing the internet...

The one thing that jumps out at me that might be a performance hog is iPhoto. What version of iPhoto are you running and how big is your iPhoto library? Some versions are notoriously bad at handling large libraries.

EDIT: also, some people are finding that the newest version of the bittorrent client (4.1.7) is a terrible CPU hog. If you are using this version, downgrading to 4.1.2 will probably help.

[ghporter]

BitTorrent uses resources pretty freely-and helps eat up your available bandwidth too. And I'll bet you're not doing everything else you do on the Mac while you're surfing on your parents' AMD machine...

[alphasubzero949]

Cocktail and OnyX do not 'speed' up your system. If you want to muck with 'secret' settings, use TinkerTool or CLIX.

At the hardware level, you should:

• Upgrade your hard drive to one that spins at 7200 RPM.
• Keep a minimum of 10% of your hard drive free.
• Buy more RAM. The more, the better.

At the software level:

• Delete caches as the first troubleshooting step.
• Repair permissions (especially with troublesome installers).
• Use DiskWarrior to repair your HD structure.

If upgrading from a previous system to Tiger, use the Archive and Install method otherwise you're asking for performance issues. If something is borked in your current install, apply the combo update of the most recent version of OS X you're using.

[HWA AFI]

My iphoto library isn't that large and neither it or bit torrent are open at the moment.

Thanks for the advice alpha How do I delete caches? I'll try reparing premissions now. DiskWarrior is a program I suppose? I'll get that as well.

If I upgrade to tiger I'll be doing a clean format. I don't believe in "upgrading" an OS version without reformatting. I'd have swap to a 7200 RPM drive when i got it but it's a pain to take apart...

[wataru]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

If I close an app I want it's damn ram back.

Read. about. the. RAM. system.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

I usually run itunes, firefox, adium, bit torrent, calculator, safari, xirc, text edit, activity monitor, and sometimes iphoto or DVD player.

Activity Monitor, especially if it's set to update every second, is expensive. It'll easily hog 10-20% of CPU. I wouldn't run it, except if you're troubleshooting a specific issue.

a 7200 RPM drive will definitely help, as well. It should improve read/write times by 15-20%.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

I have 67mb ram free now without xirc. This thing just eats up ram and won't let go of it even after closing an app. I had 600mb of ram free when I first booted this week but now I have hardly any. Only 245mb of that is active. The rest is "inactive" Apparently my virtual memory size is 4.47gb and I see "used 1.18gb" under inactive in activity monitor. WTF!

Inactive RAM is just that. The OS holds apps in memory so they'll re-launch faster To see this in action, launch an app after you've freshly booted the machine.. Take note of how long it takes to launch. Now, quit the app, and launch it again. It takes less time, because it's still in inactive RAM.

However, if you launch enough apps that you run out of free RAM, the system will begin to re-assign the inactive RAM after that. Free RAM mostly represents RAM that hasn't been assigned anything at all since booting. Wired and Active are the only categories that count towards what you've actually got in use. What's the adage? There's four types of RAM in UNIX-- Wired, Active, Inactive and Wasted.

Once you do start paging out to VM, of course, a 7200 rpm drive will help here, too.

[RobOnTheCape]

Is there any question that using the internet and flipping through pages is noticeably faster than on any mac? When I'm on a relatives older pc I definitely notice the speed I can fly through web pages in comparison. But was just wondering if this was even debatable.

[mhuie]

Originally Posted by RobOnTheCape

Is there any question that using the internet and flipping through pages is noticeably faster than on any mac? When I'm on a relatives older pc I definitely notice the speed I can fly through web pages in comparison. But was just wondering if this was even debatable.

Its not even debatable. Windows internet browsing is so much faster than on Mac. I have my Dual 2.0GHz and a old Athlon 1.4ghz PC next to each other, and as much as I don't like Windows, I rather browse on my PC then my Mac. The 10.4.3 update did speed up browsing but still is no contest to a PC.

[Thinine]

There must be something wrong with your computer then. That, or you browse some of the few sites that still don't work well on the Mac (Flash without the Flash 8 plugin, for example). Especially in Tiger with Safari running multiple threads for image decoding. Of course, if you want the absolute fastest browsing experience, you build WebKit from source and run Safari off of that.

[HWA AFI]

Well what's wrong with my computer then?

[Athens]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

Well what's wrong with my computer then?

make a new user account and test it out surfing, if its faster that will help us track down your problem. If there is no change I dont know really. Perhaps over heating issues if you keep the laptop on a bed or blanket where it cant get air.

[HWA AFI]

temp monitor lite says I'm around 58c idle and a max of 66c loaded on the cpu and gpu which is pretty safe. I'll try a new user account but last night I decided I'm going to swap for a 7200 RPM drive with a fresh format of tiger for christmas Where's a good place to buy 7200 RPM lappy drives?

new user did nothing

[wataru]

I'm about to get a Travelstar from Newegg for my iBook.

[HWA AFI]

The hitachi? I saw 4 of those there. Not sure what the difference is other than size. The read/write times look the same... And very slow at that. Then agian I'm used to my 74gb raptor

[jamil5454]

It's not anything new. Windows (and Linux) boxes are snappier at browsing the Internet than an equivalent Mac.

I've always suspected it has to do with the way graphics are rendered on OS X, but the speed is almost indiscernible between my Dual 2.0 running 10.4.3 and my Athlon64 2800 running XP SP2. And with each update Safari seems to get noticeably quicker.

I've also got a 12" 1.2 iBook with 10.4.2 on it and the browsing is slower than my Dual G5, but by no means is it annoying or unproductive. I don't really find myself waiting on my computer to render a web page; instead I'm usually waiting on my Internet connection to bring the page to me.

[Apfhex]

I prefer good looks to speed. Browsing is far more enjoyable on my Mac with Safari (or other WebKit browsers) than anything else. And Windows isn't *that* much Snappier™ anyway.

[wataru]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

The hitachi? I saw 4 of those there. Not sure what the difference is other than size. The read/write times look the same... And very slow at that. Then agian I'm used to my 74gb raptor

News flash: You're using a consumer-oriented laptop. Stop expecting high-end desktop performance.

[Athens]

Originally Posted by jamil5454

It's not anything new. Windows (and Linux) boxes are snappier at browsing the Internet than an equivalent Mac.

I've always suspected it has to do with the way graphics are rendered on OS X, but the speed is almost indiscernible between my Dual 2.0 running 10.4.3 and my Athlon64 2800 running XP SP2. And with each update Safari seems to get noticeably quicker.

I've also got a 12" 1.2 iBook with 10.4.2 on it and the browsing is slower than my Dual G5, but by no means is it annoying or unproductive. I don't really find myself waiting on my computer to render a web page; instead I'm usually waiting on my Internet connection to bring the page to me.

That use to be true, ive found for the most part Safari and Firefox is on par with Windows now, at least most people's Windows computer (infected with some spyware) only a fresh installed Windows is faster

[ghporter]

In my experience (which is limited when it comes to Macs), as long as you're not doing much else, browsing goes pretty fast. But as soon as you start other processes, the browsing speed slows down. And if you're doing something that involves your network connection in addition to surfing, that slows it down more. In this, Windows seems to have some advantage in multitasking network access-but remember that Internet Explorer is THE basic rendering engine for the whole OS in Windows, so you have to factor that into your evaluation.

Athens, it doesn't take spyware to slow down a Windows machine. It just takes time. The @^#$%$& registry accumulates useless and often damaging information, which slows down the whole machine, and it doesn't even try to clean itself, so a Windows machine is bound to slow down over time. I use Firefox exclusively on my Windows machines, and not only do I feel more confident about browsing without getting infected by some malicious web site, I also feel that I can surf more quickly because of the faster rendering engine in Firefox (which is certainly not the fastest HTML renderer there is!).

[Athens]

Originally Posted by ghporter

In my experience (which is limited when it comes to Macs), as long as you're not doing much else, browsing goes pretty fast. But as soon as you start other processes, the browsing speed slows down. And if you're doing something that involves your network connection in addition to surfing, that slows it down more. In this, Windows seems to have some advantage in multitasking network access-but remember that Internet Explorer is THE basic rendering engine for the whole OS in Windows, so you have to factor that into your evaluation.

Athens, it doesn't take spyware to slow down a Windows machine. It just takes time. The @^#$%$& registry accumulates useless and often damaging information, which slows down the whole machine, and it doesn't even try to clean itself, so a Windows machine is bound to slow down over time. I use Firefox exclusively on my Windows machines, and not only do I feel more confident about browsing without getting infected by some malicious web site, I also feel that I can surf more quickly because of the faster rendering engine in Firefox (which is certainly not the fastest HTML renderer there is!).

I agree but serious how many Windows machines make it beyond 4 months with out a reinstall I dont think they get the chance to experience time related clutter any more with spyware and viruses forcing a reinstall.

[dreamryche]

I haven't noticed any significant difference in page load speeds between Safari and Firefox on my iBook and Firefox on my P4.

[gorgonzola]

I don't know what's wrong with your machine, but for what it's worth, my machine is slower than yours (1 GHz, 768 MB RAM) and I don't experience any lagging while typing or consistent beachballing in any of the applications you mentioned.

I'm also surprised people are still talking about this browsing speed issue. I can barely notice a difference...

[dru]

Firefox on the Mac is simply not as refined as Firefox on the PC. Work's being done to bring it more and more native but it is what it is right now which is leaps and bounds past where it used to be.

I use Firefox, I like Firefox but I understand its limitations on the Mac such as using the much slower Quickdraw, not Quartz, rendering and not using native widgets. There's a lot more overhead and these things are definitely being worked on. The latest Safari in 10.4.3 is quite snappy, far better than what you must be seeing in Panther. It isn't perfect, but it's seen very nice progress.

There are a number of Bit Torrent clients. "Shop around" at versiontracker.com.

Do you have iPhoto 5 / iLife 05 or an older release? If you're still with iPhoto 2, upgrade. iPhoto 5 is far more efficient, far quicker.

Definitely get Tiger and install the updates. Don't worry about the RAM useage you are seeing. It's basically useless to compare Mac OS X's "working set" RAM requirements and VM management with Windows XP.

Keep several GB free on your HD at all times and don't keep many icons on your desktop.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Athens

I agree but serious how many Windows machines make it beyond 4 months with out a reinstall I dont think they get the chance to experience time related clutter any more with spyware and viruses forcing a reinstall.

Sadly, with a lot of Windows users' machines you're quite correct. They get all the antivirus and antispyware packages, then they don't get them installed, or they don't configure they properly or keep them up to date and bad things happen...

I recently reinstalled Windows XP on my Dell laptop because I got tired of the "uninstall" files for all the updates and patches making the C: drive fill up. I changed the installation to make sure that all program files went on the D: drive and all user files went on E:. And before I did anything else, I installed my Symantec Client Security package and updated it... Any Windows user that doesn't have a good firewall as well as a good AV package is just hanging out in the breeze.

Of course I have had to reinstall Windows on various machines at various times, but never because of a virus or spyware...It just takes some attention and knowing how to protect youreslf-and some effort.

[osxrules]

I actually think OS X is still slow. When I switch to using a PC, it acts like OS 9 did. The GUI was instantly responsive. I can zip through a pdf on an old 350MHz machine faster than my 1GHz Mini. Some graphics take an insane amount of time to load.

Under OS X, there is still a delay when I change system volume when it hasn't been buffered. There is still a delay when opening things like system preferences. It's only 3 seconds but on Windows it is practically zero.

I wouldn't like to switch to Windows because OS X has better memory management and is more stable but I want some better responsiveness.

Concerning web browsing, what really bugs me is when I visit a web page, hit back and have to wait for Safari to jump to the part of the page it was at. Again it's like a 3 second delay so when I go to click the page it jumps and I end up at another stupid link and have to click back again.

And this forum is one of the worst. I'm using Flash 8.0.22 and on that smilie advert, my CPU goes through the roof. I even resorted to removing Flash altogether so that it just loads gif images but I need Flash for other sites.

When a new operating system on new hardware is running slower than an alternate platform that is years older and technically slower then there is some serious optimization needing done to the system. Apple still don't supply options to turn all the eye candy crap off. Microsoft do and that's what the thread starter said. Apple should put in ways to make the system run better on slower hardware by allowing fancy stuff to be turned off.

So many things are slower. Even games. There may well be a whole list of reasons why this is but as a consumer, I don't care. I want results.

Here's a test you can all try. Get a Finder window and put the activity monitor to show your CPU use. Now resize the window up and down and it maxes out. OK it's using your CPU when it needs to but how smooth is the rescaling? On my 1GHz machine with 1GB RAM, it jitters. Not a smooth rescaling at all. A very old 700MHz PC scales windows in real time without jittering so why can't my brand new Mac? Maybe the windowserver is a bloated piece of crap. I don't know why. I don't care why. But I am very frustrated by it.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by osxrules

I can zip through a pdf on an old 350MHz machine faster than my 1GHz Mini. Some graphics take an insane amount of time to load.

Liar! PDFs are extremely fast in OS X compared to on PCs. I won't even read the rest of your post when the blatant lies start this early.

[analogika]

Please do a search on window resizing.

Using window resizing to gauge the speed of Mac OS X vs. Windows XP is the most bone-headedly idiotic comparison.

It's kind of like comparing a modern skyscraper office building with a 1950s mobile trailer home and claiming that the trailer is much more nimble.

No shi†, Sherlock. They do *slightly* different things in addition to "enclosing people".

[goMac]

Originally Posted by HWA AFI

I've been running a mac for 11 months now and I hardly know anything about the OS aside from basic commands and useage. In win XP/2k theres a lot of things you can tweak to speed it up and squeeze that extra little bit of performance out of applications. Are there any performance enhancing tweaks for OS X? I'm running 10.3.9 right now and I haven't been able to find much as far as tweaking OS X to speed it up

You're comparing a desktop and a laptop. A desktop will nearly always feel fast than a laptop, because of the hard drive.

[moonmonkey]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

Liar! PDFs are extremely fast in OS X compared to on PCs. I won't even read the rest of your post when the blatant lies start this early.

Exactly.
After Panther 10.3 PDF rendering on Macs over took PC's by a large degree.
I still get lags on a 2 Ghz Pentium but smooth as Baileys on a 700 Mhz iMac.

[Sophus]

Originally Posted by mhuie

Its not even debatable. Windows internet browsing is so much faster than on Mac. I have my Dual 2.0GHz and a old Athlon 1.4ghz PC next to each other, and as much as I don't like Windows, I rather browse on my PC then my Mac. The 10.4.3 update did speed up browsing but still is no contest to a PC.

Well, I have a PC laptop with a 1.8 GHZ Pentium M proc, 1GB ram and 7200 RPM disk. At home I have a PowerBook 1.5 GHZ, 7200 RPM disk with 1.25 GB ram.

In general, I don't see any noticable difference in browser speed, using Safari 2.02 and Tiger on the mac and IE or Firefox on the PC.

However, pages using heavy flash slows down the mac (badly written Flash plugin or problems with the way OSX composites the UI probably). I have fixed this by blocking ad servers in my host file. Several sites have updated hostfiles for cut and paste. Furthermore, this enhances my browsing experience (I hate flashing ads and banners, taking my concentration away from the stuff I actually want to focus on).

Works well, saves bandwidth, quicker loadtimes, better scrolling rates and makes for a more pleasant web experience. Much better than CSS blocking which slows down the page drawing significantly.

[osxrules]

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

Liar! PDFs are extremely fast in OS X compared to on PCs. I won't even read the rest of your post when the blatant lies start this early.

I agree that pdf viewing has gotten faster by a lot since the earlier versions of OS X but I'm being honest about the speed of the PC. It may just appear faster on the PC because it seems to lower the pdf quality while scrolling and then render when you land on a page. OS X seems to keep the quality while scrolling so it lags.

Imagine it like a movie where you are scrubbing through it. It's useless when the keyframes are too far apart because you only get to see one frame every 30 seconds or so. For a movie with a lot of keyframes, it's great for seeing where you want to be.

Originally Posted by analogika

Please do a search on window resizing.

Using window resizing to gauge the speed of Mac OS X vs. Windows XP is the most bone-headedly idiotic comparison.

It's kind of like comparing a modern skyscraper office building with a 1950s mobile trailer home and claiming that the trailer is much more nimble.

No shi†, Sherlock. They do *slightly* different things in addition to "enclosing people".

And the prize for weirdest analogy goes to...

Anyway, I wasn't comparing the speed of my Mac solely on the window resizing issue. That's one of many things that just lag where a PC is snappy.

Now I know that OS X windows are double buffered and that slows down redraw but isn't the Finder window rendered on hardware these days? That should be scaling a single plane on the GPU.

If the interface wasn't still slow then why do so many people still say they want the OS 9 snappiness back?

[threestain]

Quick question...

menu meters - does it suck up cpu when placed in the menubar (dislpaying network and cpu info) like the activity monitor does?