[michaelb]

The "Want speed? Get memory!" is a point I've seen mentioned a few times in posts throughout these forums but I don't believe it has been reinforced enough.

128 MB is, in my opinion after using X extensively on 2 machines now, quite inadequate and produces a poor Mac OS X experience. Apple should be stating more clearly that 128 MB is a minimal configuration, not an optimal one.

The sweet spot is 256 MB. Anything less gives a very disappointing impression, with long periods of spinning rainbow cursors and general reluctance of the machine to respond to your actions.

Any time you hear your hard disk churning, that is the swap file switching memory between RAM and hard disk. As RAM is orders of magnitude faster than a hard disk, performance suffers greatly.

(By the way, I have a Cube. The hard drive is the only thing I can hear! So I know what it's doing. PowerBook owners can diagnose this way too.)

That's the bad news. The good news is that RAM is as cheap as chips at the moment (at around US$30 per 64 MB).

Get some!

[starfleetX]

Agreed, get more RAM everybody! Now's the best time, too. I just got another 512 MB of Cas2 2-2-2 PC100 for just $160. Kick ass. Now I'm cruising at 832 MB... yummy.

I have 448mg on a G4 400 PCI and the OS is SLOW!! I have to wait for it to catch up with me. This is ok at home where I am jusy testing it, but its far to slow to be used for work, it just stops any sort of work flow!!

I got my G4 at home because of OSX and how I feel I should have stuck to my 233 iMac. I think Apple are hoping people will go out and buy new hardware.... that SUCK APPLE!!

[Gee4orce]

Well, Apple's plan would work - if there was actually any faster hardware to buy....

[ckohler]

Originally posted by Adam, Newcastle Uk:
I have 448mg on a G4 400 PCI and the OS is SLOW!! I have to wait for it to catch up with me.

Not to change the subject, but can you be more specific? Exactly how does it have to 'catch up with you'? Frankly, I'm getting pretty tried of all these generalizations on speed. It can't ALL be slow... even those who despise OSX's performance eventually agree that the perceived speed loss only affects some things. It's obvious you feel it's slow but if you were to be more specific, those of us with acceptable performance may be able to help. Well.. except when one's perception of speed is based solely on over-expectations in which case there's nothing we can do.

When I say slow I am referring mainly to the Finder. Just opening up a folder with more than 10 items in, is slow. There seems to be about a second delay from when you double click on the folder and to when the folder opens, sometimes more.

Another thing is the pop down menus. Like some other people have said, just try opening the file menu and then run the mouse over the other menus.

Also when you are down loading files they don't appear on the desktop right away, only if you move your mouse over where they should be.

I have also had problems with the dock, when hiding it. I would move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to see the dock again and would have to wait 5 seconds for it to show itself.

Someone said to try turning of the indexing in Sherlock that might help a little...

Mac OSX is like going on holiday to a nice tropical island. Everything looks great, the sort of place you would like to live all the time. But you don't like the slower way of life on the island and you relies if you wanted to work here there would be no place to plug your computer in. You would have to go back to the mainland ( OS9 ) to get anything done.

G4 400
448Mg
10g HD

Ok I think I know what the problem might be for me. I have 256meg (pc100) of ram which is unbranded I got from a computer fair. When I get home I will take this out and see what the difference is..... I will still have about 190mg, which should be ok I hope. I will post back later..

[mmj_ngen]

I have a g3/350 w/320MB Ram, 30GB HD (Maxtor Diamond Plus, brand new). No scsi card. No other strange hardware. About 85% of the time, it takes about 20-30 seconds to open a folder regardless of the Finder view (list, icon, browser). I've done multiple reinstalls, multiple/single partitions etc.

Actually, interacting with the Finder at all usually causes a very long time lag.

I would consider 20 seconds to open a relatively small folder to be slow .

[geekstud]

Question to the folks experiencing poor performance: what
format choice did you select for the Mac OS X partition?

Contrary to my expectations, selecting UFS was the kiss of
death for performance on both a G4 533DP (512 MB RAM)
with 36GB Ultra160 SCSI (Apple/ATTO card) and an iMac DV SE (standard 128 MB RAM and 13 GB EIDE). I re-installed
on both systems selecting HFS+ and noticed a dramatic
change for the better in system performance. The installation
took half the time when using HFS, about 20 minutes vs. 40
minutes for UFS.

Using HFS+ for the Mac OS X partition also solve a Classic
launch problem/bug that is triggered when using UFS (even
if trying to use a separate HFS+ Classic partition).

Cheers,

-Nathan

[mmj_ngen]

geekstud, HFS+ for everthing. I guess I did something to make it mad. I posted in the in the Usage and Support forum, about how my Dock won't show up many times on restart (can't manually start it either). If it does, it dies everytime I try to click on it. It happens even with a clean install.

I was going to do a low level format of the drive and try yet again, but I read somewhere else in the forums that this is bad for Maxtors. I really don't understand why and I've never heard that before, so I'm having trouble buying into it. I may do a low level format tonight.

[mar]

hey starfleetX,
Where'd you find $160 512's? The cheapest I've seen lately has been $175, they were $157 for a while but�

------------------
Michael Riedel
R I E D E L Photography
p: 360.649.6763
f: 360.297.5473
e: [email protected]
w: http://www.accessone.com/~mar/

[3.1416]

I have a g3/350 w/320MB Ram, 30GB HD (Maxtor Diamond Plus, brand new). No scsi card. No other strange hardware. About 85% of the time, it takes about 20-30 seconds to open a folder regardless of the Finder view (list, icon, browser).

There's definitely something wrong there. My Wallstreet was much better than that even when it only had 128 MB RAM. I'd try a low-level format, zeroing everything. I suppose it could be a problem with OS X and certain third party drives (I hope not, since I'm about to go home and put a 40 gig Quantum in my G4...I bet disk and RAM vendors are pretty happy about OS X shipping...)

Back to the original topic, having lots of RAM makes a huge difference. I upgraded my Wallstreet from 128 to 320 today, and OS X has gone from just barely usable to very responsive. (It still needs video acceleration, which is hopefully forthcoming in an update soon.) I've got a bunch of apps open, including OmniWeb, IE, and Project Builder, and vm_stat says I have no pageouts and around 40 megs free (so if I only had 256 megs I'd be swapping by now). Hopefully Apple can reduce the memory requirements in the future, in the meantime I'd recommend that anyone who seriously wants to run OS X get at least 256 megs and preferably more.

[mmj_ngen]

I thought I'd post a follow up for all the trouble that I've been having. When I came home from work, I was about to execute a low level format. I forgot that I left the machine on when I went to work to run the Disk Utility's Test Disk to search for bad blocks. I also upgraded the ribbon connecting the hard drive to a higher quality ribbon.

Well, one of those did it. When I came home, there was a message letting me know that no problems where found during Test Disk. I changed the ribbon on a whim and the system suddenly went from an unusable, major stress inducer, to an extremely fast and responsive stress reliever. Like I said, each folder used to open in around 20 to 30 seconds. Now it flies. I can't even start to time it usually. Sometimes it's a second or two for large folders, but that's it...no BS. Classic even starts up extremely fast.

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones. I seriously started to think that the people that were posting good performance experiences were Mac evangelists that weren't being as objective as one would hope. Sorry. I just hope it lasts (Oh, and the Dock has returned for good. Very happy. The contextual menus in the Dock are excellent.).

[dtriska]

Originally posted by Adam, Newcastle Uk:
When I say slow I am referring mainly to the Finder. Just opening up a folder with more than 10 items in, is slow. There seems to be about a second delay from when you double click on the folder and to when the folder opens, sometimes more.

Other than the common problem with list view, my folder opening is instantaneous.

Originally posted by Adam, Newcastle Uk:
Another thing is the pop down menus. Like some other people have said, just try opening the file menu and then run the mouse over the other menus.

Again, I'm having no problems. The sub-menus appear instantaneously.

Originally posted by Adam, Newcastle Uk:
Also when you are down loading files they don't appear on the desktop right away, only if you move your mouse over where they should be.

I'm using OmniWeb cf3 and all of my downloaded files appear, again, instantaneously. Maybe this is a problem with IE?

Originally posted by Adam, Newcastle Uk:
I have also had problems with the dock, when hiding it. I would move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to see the dock again and would have to wait 5 seconds for it to show itself.

As you can guess, I'm not having a problem with this either. There is a delay where I can say "one" before the Dock pops up, but I think Apple put that in because people were complaining the Dock popped up far too easily.

Okay, I am using a DP machine, but I don't think that is the main reason for my success.

[iKevin]

i have a Pismo 400 w/512mb of ram and it runs like a tree sloth with OS X installed. Clean install off a freshly formatted HDD using HFS+....i have messed with 3 machines that have OS X on them and they have all been ultra slow. My question to you guys that say it performs good is: what are you running this on? 733mhz G4 or something? cause so far i've seen g3s and g4s up to 500mhz and they are slugs with OS X installed....

I also have 512Megs... and I see that damn spinning cursor all day l o n g. Switching back to OS 9 has made me feel like I am running free.

[mmj_ngen]

I mentioned my specs above, if you want a little more detail, but basically a B/W G3 350 and 320 MB RAM. I know some folks mentioned that different RAM can cause havoc, but I'm using 3 different brands of RAM including Kensington ValueRAM. I wish I had a better idea of what actually helped. Maybe try the Test Disk operation, like I did...I don't know. I was so pissed about OSX, maybe the verbal abuse helped.

[This message has been edited by mmj_ngen (edited 03-27-2001).]

[iamnotmad]

Hello, I just wanted to add that I just took a 256mb DIMM out of one of my pc's and added it to this imac dv 400 for a total of 320mb now, from 128. Let me say that OSX is so very much faster than at 128mb. It appears as though it is caching to HD so much less, and almost everything (besides window resizing is quicker! It is very excellent!

(hoping for some shiny new video drivers to appear sometime soon!)
thanks.

[iloveOSX]

anyone know the exact ram limit of an original ibook?

[snodman]

With a PCI G4/400 and 256K of RAM Mac OS X is positively zippy for me. Clean installation onto a wiped drive. Started with a virgin installation of 9.1 from the new CD and then installed OS X over it (kept my normal 9.1 installation on a separate drive). Once OS 9.1 loads Classic is surprisingly fast. My Epson 880 is supported directly in OS X and with all the bells and whistles if you dig a little bit. No joy for my IDE ORB drive or 2906 SCSI card for my Zip drive. My internal Sony CRX 145E boots fine but gets VERY weird results from iTunes (all the audio tracks are the wrong length and the end of one real track just gets appended onto the beginning of the next one). It does not matter if you are just playing a whole CD to the speakers but you can't rip an MP3 properly. Furthermore the online identification databases are stumped since the trac lengths are munged. Also no driver from UMAX for my scanner (maybe ever, they say - gee it is ancient - ONE WHOLE YEAR old).