[technohedz]

It takes one (1) second to switch between most of the preference pane applications on my bottom of the line 17" iMac G5. I'm also killing tons of performance running virex 7.5.1, AND this is on automatic. The current interface is missing a bit of critical UI speed that was in 9 and it does effect my workflow. I could say that in 9 I was somewhat precognisant of the computer controls and could think more of my work. It was just click, keyboard combo, click, doubleclick...w/o the blink of an eye and I was doing what I wanted. In OS X I don't have that forward control, but have to do something one step at a time. This has improved a lot in the later releases and w/ the faster processors. I wouldn't trade the abilities of OS X for anything else on the market, but UI speed really should be addressed. Would kill off transparency completely for a 33% gain in UI responsiveness...sure for some things...but when you start to composite or code w/ a transparent overlay then you reap the benefits so in general no. This thread is really informative, but anyone claiming the kind of poor peformance mentioned has something wrong with their machine.

[ecrelin]

All this talk about 9 vs X is ridiculous. 9 was a monolithic system for small computers. OS X is the real deal. XP is still from yesterday, let's see how Longshot runs on today's equipment when (if, remember Copland) it comes out. BUT other than the OP's targa image updates over a network how much does the "lag" effect all of your productivity? (technohedz why the Virex?) I still type ahead of Word but that's been the same (os 9 too) for as long as I've used that piece of crap. Yes and blame Adobe for their apps running slow. Sad that a second or two ticks you off, maybe you could actually look out the window or just take a deep breath.

[cla]

Originally posted by abe2:
Have you even tried running Repair Permissions?
This just looks like a lot of whining without you having even tried to fix it yet.
I can badmouth Winblowz XP just as much as you can buddy.

Sorry "buddy", I didn't know I had to Repair Permissions on my brand-new iMac G5/1,25 GB ram featuring a state-of-the-art OS that I bought three weeks ago.
Do you suggest I do that every third week then?

[whoppa]

I'm using a 800 MHz iBook G4 with 640Mb and OSX runs quite snappy on it. On the systems bought today the performance is more than adequate.

If someone on a iMac G5 with 1.25Gb of Ram has the problems described something is seriously wrong. Maybe a performance test would be a good option to see how his system stacks up compared to simmilar systems. I can think of a bad RAM module.

Its funny to see everybody wining about OSX interface performance. Trust me. In my experience XP is only faster the 1th month of use, after that the system slows down to a crawl..

He's right tough: Faster processors make programmers lazy . But we want ever more functionality, that eats processing power.

[darcybaston]

Repairing permissions has caused more problems than fix any for me. *shrug*

The OS X UI gets faster all the time, but I did curse it on a G3 iMac for several years while transitioning from 9 to X (ie:dual boot setup).

Nothing is slower than menu/window redraws in GoLive CS though.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

2. Little hardware acceleration. QuickDraw (and Windows graphics) have been accelerated by the GPU (or equivalent hardware in systems that don't really have a GPU) since time immemorial. Only recently has Quartz had any hardware acceleration at all (Quartz Extreme, which moved window compositing to the GPU in Jaguar). In Tiger, hardware acceleration will be back to the point it was with QuickDraw, with nearly all graphics drawn by the GPU (at least on the cards that support it). This should take care of any 'problems' people have with the responsiveness of OS X's GUI.

I think you've hit on it exactly - once core image matures you'll have hardware acceleration for all effects. There have been videocards in the past that had special chips for acceleration of PDF compositing however. I can remember one I was looking at a while back but I can't find it on google.

I do find it hard to believe that todays videocards, ei my Ti4600, can't handle this type of calculation, and that it does not have hardware to do it with. My opinion is that the code remains unoptimized and that the developers are waiting for faster hardware.

Maybe Tiger will do it with coreimage and with the selected 2.0 pixelshader enabled cards... but I'm not holding my breath.

As far as Avalon and Longhorn, this is when the real development will start and where the hardware optimizations will follow. Since windows is snappy now and since you'd have the entire fscking enterprise throwing a bitch fit if the desktop suddenly got as slow as OS X's is right now.

Further, I agree with one of the earlier posters who said they could do without all the fancy effects and get some usability back.

Right now, it's all one big joke that aqua *feels* like you're working underwater, and it makes me want to stalk down the gui developers and squarely kick them in the ass. After all, the only thing that anybody can understand fully is the fear of impending doom

So let me recap what my viewpoint of what the Mac has been in the like working on since the Classic OS was around:

System 7 - 9: Snappy... faster than working on a PC... for all of 3 min then my machine reboots and my entire workflow is gone... and the swearing and cursing have lost my train of thought.

OS X 10.0 to present: Holy sh!t it doesn't crash! Damn, it's not the hardware! But wait... it's slow as sh!t! Aqua truly *is* aqua, since I'm now working underwater... no apps because everybody has to change up everything to compile on the new OS. Will this bullsh!t ever end? Wow 3 releases with all the hype and promise but nothing yet to write home about... oh wow my dock goes "poof"! ...3 days later who really cares what goes poof besides my mac to a PC.

PC Windows 95 - XP Pro: Oh ****! it does not crash! Damn, the interface is snappy! It's got every program known to man! It's not as pretty as Aqua, but it's not underwater either! Oh **** I just got a virus... better keep this Lament Configuration off the LAN!!! Bill Gates was a hell of a programmer... oh wait a min, no... he's a hell of a salesman who hires really good programmers and takes all the credit for it! Oh well, who cares... I can actually get some work done on this thing... what? I'm fired? Fsck you too!

[cla]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
Whether his opinions are valid or not, he's clearly here just to whine about them.

Yes. Thanks. Very mature.

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
as well as forum threads here and on arstechnica ( http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/...gm_sotu_ref.mov )

That is so cool! I've never seen that presentation but now for the first time I understand what the Tiger-fuzz is all about.

Originally posted by whoppa:
Trust me. In my experience XP is only faster the 1th month of use, after that the system slows down to a crawl..

That is very true.

Originally posted by tmornini:
Think of OS X as tomorrow's OS, today!

Let me rephraze that:
Think of OS X as tomorrow's OS, running on tomorrow's computers, today!

:>

[2young4rock]

Originally posted by cla:
Sorry "buddy", I didn't know I had to Repair Permissions on my brand-new iMac G5/1,25 GB ram featuring a state-of-the-art OS that I bought three weeks ago.
Do you suggest I do that every third week then?

actually, yes, you should be repairing your permissions once a month on average. unix is much more comlex a system than os 9 and is constantly re-writing files. go ask any apple genius, they'll say once a month a least. oh, and id say especially if its a brand new computer. chances are you got it and loaded it up with a lot new software, right? give your system a chance to go back through and make sure everything is as its supposed to be. the new software put in all of its hooks and your system has to adjust.

[Vi0]

The original poster is right on the money. I was using an iMac G5 17" 1.6 GHz 256 MB RAM display model, and it only felt a little faster than an iMac G3 400 MHz 640 MB RAM. That too me is just ridiculous. The speed of a 3 GHz P4 1 GB RAM Windows XP Machine is unmatched right now. Some people just love to blame everything like permissions, etc. just to avoid saying Mac OS X is slow. Face reality already.

[darcybaston]

vi0: I've seen the same lack of difference in UI response compared to my iBook and dual G5 towers at Apple stores. Apple may have standardized the speed of genie, window resizing and the like regardless of hardware. LOL! Certainly feels that way.

Experientially for me, apps are faster, as are graphic elements not related to OS X windows, but the window management and the Finder vary little. Not that I'm qualified to say I ran formal tests. Just being anecdotal.

I just tried comparing window resize/refresh speeds of Safari, Textwrangler and AddressBook. Safari and AddressBook resize at about the same choppy-as-hell speed, while Textwrangler is even slower. Oh well. I love this OS and those apps just the same.

iBook G4 933MHz 14" 640MB RAM

[PBG4 User]

Originally posted by Vi0:
The original poster is right on the money. I was using an iMac G5 17" 1.6 GHz 256 MB RAM display model, and it only felt a little faster than an iMac G3 400 MHz 640 MB RAM. That too me is just ridiculous. The speed of a 3 GHz P4 1 GB RAM Windows XP Machine is unmatched right now. Some people just love to blame everything like permissions, etc. just to avoid saying Mac OS X is slow. Face reality already.

You're comparing a computer with 256MB RAM to a computer with 1GB RAM? Why don't you up your iMac's RAM to 1GB then retest?

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Originally posted by Vi0:
Face reality already.

What? Here? Right now?

[SmileyDude]

Originally posted by 2young4rock:
actually, yes, you should be repairing your permissions once a month on average. unix is much more comlex a system than os 9 and is constantly re-writing files. go ask any apple genius, they'll say once a month a least. oh, and id say especially if its a brand new computer. chances are you got it and loaded it up with a lot new software, right? give your system a chance to go back through and make sure everything is as its supposed to be. the new software put in all of its hooks and your system has to adjust.

Well, if Apple's installer was a bit better about not obliterating permissions, we wouldn't need to worry about these issues. For example, under Linux, installing new RPMs doesn't screw up the permissions.

Now granted, I'd much rather use OS X than Linux on a daily basis, but it's not like this is an unsolvable problem.

I'm kinda surprised that Apple hasn't made the permissions check a cron task yet -- seems like they would just turn it on by default, and allow people to turn it off if they feel it's necessary.

[eddiecatflap]

window resize and java seem to be the main prob at the moment

i surf with java off or it slows my mac to a crawl

[Catfish_Man]

In general, repair permissions is a placebo thing, like rebuilding the desktop was on OS9. It *can* fix some stuff, but it usually is completely unneeded.

[ryaxnb]

Well... I agree. Aqua is slower then it should be. But; i'm on an old iBook 900, not a fast iMac G5. Do you have at least 512 MB RAM? Important for anything more then casual, web, photo, and mail usage.

[Ji Eun]

ah... resizing safari windows is a perfect example. what are the chances of this not happening in Tiger?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
iBook G4 800 / 640 RAM

[Lebensm�de]

Originally posted by 2young4rock:
actually, yes, you should be repairing your permissions once a month on average. unix is much more comlex a system than os 9 and is constantly re-writing files. go ask any apple genius, they'll say once a month a least. oh, and id say especially if its a brand new computer. chances are you got it and loaded it up with a lot new software, right? give your system a chance to go back through and make sure everything is as its supposed to be. the new software put in all of its hooks and your system has to adjust.

Not to forget leaving the Mac on all night for the cron scripts to run. If you don't like the idea of leaving your Mac on all night you can always run a shareware utility such as Cocktail which will perform all of these things (including permissions repair) for you.

Funny that noone has mentioned this yet...

[Hash]

What does Cocktail or other utilities have to do with slowness of GUI? Yes, the GUI, Finder or whatever is SLOW in OS X. There is no way to compare it to Windows and OS 9. GUI is so slow, its total crap. Now only do not tell me that OS X Finder is fast because it copies large files faster than OS 9...

When Finder and GUI will be repaired, is beyond my understanding. Tiger seems to only marginally improve things and thats because it utilizes hardware better. But basics of the slow Finder and GUI remain.. in.. aqua... underwater...zz..zz..zz... slo-o-o-ww......

[Lebensm�de]

Originally posted by Hash:
What does Cocktail or other utilities have to do with slowness of GUI?

Because if you don't run such utilities regularly the GUI begins to slow down considerably.

The only thing I don't understand is why Apple doesn't publicize this more for the sake of those users who don't hang out on forums like this...

[darcybaston]

Because its weird. Can you imagine people considering switching to apple talking about that, "yeah, you have to start leaving your computer on at night". Not too environmentally friendly either.

[Hash]

Originally posted by Lebensm�de:
Because if you don't run such utilities regularly the GUI begins to slow down considerably.

The only thing I don't understand is why Apple doesn't publicize this more for the sake of those users who don't hang out on forums like this...

I have not seen any proof that permissions repair accelerates OS X GUI - maybe it reduces beachballs - but speed of GUI is a still bit different thing - if you understand what I mean. Using Cocktail or Onyx will help to reduce beachballs but will not make your Finder as speedy as OS 9 Finder.

[ecrelin]

What a bunch of pinheads. I see three and four stars under the names of people who don't know anything about their own operating systems and most likely much less about the others. That must mean "elite whiners" or you need LOTS of help because of cluelessness. I don't use utilities unless I need them and you don't need to repair permissions that frequently. There is lots of free information about how the system works so instead of creating a little "feel bad" club why don't you learn something or better yet I don't think the Mac community would feel too bad if you all just went out and got Dells TODAY, especially you Tyler you genius. These boards were conceived for the exchange of USEFUL information and problem solving and there isn't one iota of that in this thread. I know Apple forced you all to buy those machines and I imagine you are all "victims" in many ways in the rest of your sorry lives as well. You'll all make perfect Windows users�

[IamBob]

Those cron jobs that never get run don't really affect performance that much - switching tabs in Safari certainly isn't going to be any faster after running them. Once every 3 months is good enough, if you want to be anal about it. Only one of my systems has ever run them and they're all just as fast now as they ever were. Quit passing these things off as cure-alls, they don't affect performance that much (if at all, in the case of Repair Permissions). And Tiger is right around the corner anyway...

No, what you really want to do is max your ram, get a faster HD (!!!) and get the best video card (if) you can. The faster the drive the less you'll notice the deferred loading (think System Preferences - and almost every other app out there), the faster apps will load and the faster swapping is, which, the more ram you have happens less often. The better the video card..duh.

Faster drives are the most overlooked upgrade though. Even pulling up Safari's preferences window the first time causes a 1/2 second (measured with, "one, one [done] thousand" - apply salt) delay on my iBook. Not terrible but obviously the heavier the resource being loaded the worse it is. A 10,000 rpm drive would suck (quite literally) in a portable but for desktops there's no/few excuses.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the performance I'm seeing considering the hardware I'm using and how little maintenance I've had to perform (ie, none).

[cla]

Originally posted by Tyler McAdams:
System 7 - 9: Snappy... faster than working on a PC...

Actually I was quite disappointed with System 7.0 as it suffered from the same laggyness on machines that would just fly away with system 6.x.

System 7 also introduced a lot of fluffyness in the Finder which, just as the lickable buttons of Aqua, wasn't necessary to "get the job done". (Apple also removed the standard gray background - a decision they were later forced to revise.)

Turned out System 7 provided a nice and harmonic environment to "get the job done" in, if you just had the machine for it.

[darcybaston]

cla, there's wisdom in what you say.

[Daemon2]

1.6 Ghz G5 512 Mb. The interface does seem a little bit slower than Windows, but it isn't really that big a deal to me. I love OS X and there's no way you'll ever get me to switch to a PC.

[iOta]

I use an iMac G3 400 with 1 GB of RAM, which is dual boot. ;-) And, yes, I've always noticed that the OS X GUI runs more slowly than that of OS 9; just not as snappy. And the G5's I've tried don't seem to look much faster in redrawing. Their mouse tracking speed is better, though.
From what I've learned in this informative thread, Apple is working on the issue, and may or may not get it all down in Tiger. For now, faster HD's and more RAM certainly help. I love the stability of OS X, but I think it's important to have the feeling you're using a fast computer when you sit down in front of a G5.
And there's a lot to be said for simplicity, even in the computer world.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Turned out System 7 provided a nice and harmonic environment to "get the job done" in, if you just had the machine for it. [/B]

Yes... for all of 3 min then your machine crashed.

[gFizzle22]

Originally posted by cla:
Sorry "buddy", I didn't know I had to Repair Permissions on my brand-new iMac G5/1,25 GB ram featuring a state-of-the-art OS that I bought three weeks ago.
Do you suggest I do that every third week then?

Running disk permissions is kind of routine maintence in OS X, and yes, you want to do it at least once a month. The characteristics you're describing are NOT normal. You had the memory upgraded, there is a chance the extra stick might be bad.

[Brake]

Originally posted by IamBob:
Faster drives are the most overlooked upgrade though. Even pulling up Safari's preferences window the first time causes a 1/2 second (measured with, "one, one [done] thousand" - apply salt) delay on my iBook. Not terrible but obviously the heavier the resource being loaded the worse it is. A 10,000 rpm drive would suck (quite literally) in a portable but for desktops there's no/few excuses.

Originally posted by iOta:
For now, faster HD's and more RAM certainly help. I love the stability of OS X, but I think it's important to have the feeling you're using a fast computer when you sit down in front of a G5.

I would like to use my virgin post to support the above statements. I use a G4/400 and I think that Apple could make nice improvemnt to perceived performance if the Finders handling of disks were done differently. Today all my internal and external drives have to spin up, even if they are asleep, just to display my home folder in a save-dialog. Needless to say, things would have been much snappier if sleeping drives were left sleeping. I don't feel that the small delays in Quarts have any noticeable effect on my productivity on my 400 MHz Mac.

Ingmar

[Millennium]

Originally posted by darcybaston:
Because its weird. Can you imagine people considering switching to apple talking about that, "yeah, you have to start leaving your computer on at night". Not too environmentally friendly either.

Actually, it's not as environmentally-unfriendly as one might first believe. Macs use surprisingly little electricity compared to PCs. We're a far cry from the days of the first Macs, which used less power than a 60-watt lightbulb, but we're still not doing too badly.

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by ecrelin:
What a bunch of pinheads.

And you are the genius of computers? Please resort to calling people derogatory names elsewhere.

[Stradlater]

Originally posted by technohedz:
It takes one (1) second to switch between most of the preference pane applications on my bottom of the line 17" iMac G5. I'm also killing tons of performance running virex 7.5.1, AND this is on automatic. The current interface is missing a bit of critical UI speed that was in 9 and it does effect my workflow. I could say that in 9 I was somewhat precognisant of the computer controls and could think more of my work. It was just click, keyboard combo, click, doubleclick...w/o the blink of an eye and I was doing what I wanted. In OS X I don't have that forward control, but have to do something one step at a time. This has improved a lot in the later releases and w/ the faster processors. I wouldn't trade the abilities of OS X for anything else on the market, but UI speed really should be addressed. Would kill off transparency completely for a 33% gain in UI responsiveness...sure for some things...but when you start to composite or code w/ a transparent overlay then you reap the benefits so in general no. This thread is really informative, but anyone claiming the kind of poor peformance mentioned has something wrong with their machine.

Firstly, Virex -- in my experience -- is a terrible program that you shouldn't be running if you have OS X (which still has no viruses, five years later). Turn it off.

Secondly, you cannot compare the workflow of OS X to OS 9. If your workflow is linear, and you do not multitask, but rather wait for every task to finish before moving to the next, then maybe you should search for an old Mac and use it instead. OS X, if utilized correctly, is actually much faster -- overall -- than the operating systems of yore, even if the everyday window-resizes (how often do you resize a window, anyway?), etc. are slower.

[leperkuhn]

Originally posted by Stradlater:
Firstly, Virex -- in my experience -- is a terrible program that you shouldn't be running if you have OS X (which still has no viruses, five years later). Turn it off.

Secondly, you cannot compare the workflow of OS X to OS 9. If your workflow is linear, and you do not multitask, but rather wait for every task to finish before moving to the next, then maybe you should search for an old Mac and use it instead. OS X, if utilized correctly, is actually much faster -- overall -- than the operating systems of yore, even if the everyday window-resizes (how often do you resize a window, anyway?), etc. are slower.

I gotta agree with this - how many apps abused cooperative multitasking to the point where you couldn't do anything else?

For those of you who loved os 7-9 so much, I suggest booting into it and trying it again. It blows.

[Hash]

You miss the point, there is no direct link between multitasking and slow GUI..

[IamBob]

Actually, it's not as environmentally-unfriendly as one might first believe. Macs use surprisingly little electricity compared to PCs. We're a far cry from the days of the first Macs, which used less power than a 60-watt lightbulb, but we're still not doing too badly

I'll add that you can sleep the monitor but keep the rest of the system up. And if all it does over night is run the cron jobs you're not going to notice a difference on your power bill - it'll be idle most of the time.

Something that's way (way!) more environmentally unfriendly...

"A 1990 report of the U.S. Energy Information Administration indicated 38% of America's households heat water by electricity. At a cost of about $22 billion per year."

And some Canadian estimates...
"North America's 100 million families, heating many trillions of gallons of cold water totally wastes over 40 billion dollars annually and burns up some 300 million barrels-of-oil (or energy equivalent)." and "Worldwide, about a billion tons of CO2 are released annually from hot water heating."

I can't even imagine what the cost/pollution is now, 15 years later!

edit; not sure when the Canadian estimates were produced, they could be more current than the US-EIA estimate I quoted.

[Stradlater]

Originally posted by Hash:
You miss the point, there is no direct link between multitasking and slow GUI..

Correct. So in the meantime (till hardware can render OS X in a speedy-enough manner for you), settle for one or the other.

I'm going to settle for a slightly-slower GUI in exchange for a faster -- overall -- experience.

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by leperkuhn:
For those of you who loved os 7-9 so much, I suggest booting into it and trying it again. It blows.

God, isn't that the truth.

I still have to support OS 9, and while using it, I try to do something, you know, like you would in OS X. But nothing happens because... you can't do anything, you have to wait until something else is done.

Co-op multitasking blows for sure.

But for those who like the snappy� in OS 9, go for it. I like the fluidity of OS X.

Apple has designed into the GUI, a snappiness factor, by throttling what amount of cpu% the GUI gets. Even on the fastest G5, some say is too slow. The GUI is time sliced against many other processes and it doesn't get [ or can't take ] precedence like it can in OS 9. Even holding the mouse down in a menu in OS 9 causes everything to stop. Apple avoids this kind of problem in OS X, at the expense of the snappy.

Apple eliminated the GUI from causing any stuttering in the background processes because of heavy cpu usage from UI interaction. Window resizing is one, where one could resize a window causing an application to use a lot of cpu and other background processes suffered.

It would be best, if Apple provided a way to easily adjust this throttling for the GUI, but I don't see it happening. A simple radio button or menu to select whether background processes or the UI gets more [ reniced ] timeslices.

[IamBob]

ps -cxo command,pid | grep WindowServer | tail -c +18

Running that in the Terminal gives us the PID (process number) of the WindowServer.

sudo renice -10 PID

Gives the WindowServer a higher priority than anything else (options are 20 to -20 [low to high] so '-10' is well above the default 0).

After you do that you may want to relaunch your GUI apps so they inherit the higher priority but it's not required - they should see a benefit anyway, since the WindowServer will get more time and you can always set priorities on a per-app basis if you want.

And if the Terminal scares you there are GUI wrappers out there...

[Mooga2]

Without reading the other comments about which OS is better, I have to agree that MacOSX is slow. Using Macs and PCs for the majority of everyday, the Mac is much slower at window resizing, internet browsing, file opening, etc. From a purely functional standpoint, I think that Apple has too many effects going on (ie. I don't need to see my window grown bigger, I just want it open!).

But as for aesethetics, nobody can touch Apple. The PC is just an ugly rendition that most people have to suffer with.

- Moo!

[Link]

I have my complaints, the finder is a piece of crap and apple has a long way to go if they think they can make a mainstream browser, but unless you're lazy, your web browsing doesn't *have* to be slow, especially if you have a g4 or g5.

There's such things as "g4 and g5 optimized camino and firefox builds" -- no they don't fix the "bunch of animated GIFs cause the program to lag like no ****ing tomorrow" bug, but they do reduce load times significantly, making safari look like a poorly coded piece of junk (which is all apple seems to make nowadays)... take offense if you wish, but look at the facts:

1. it took apple 4, if not 5 versions of iphoto to make one that didn't suck -- even now they're advertising how iphoto 5 is "more stable and faster" than iphoto 4..
2. iChat *still* has bugs and nobody really knows if version 3 will fix that
3. Safari, at 2 years old, is still buggy and slow -- that's almost how long it took MS to overcome netscape with their IE browser.. lol.
4. Finder, oh finder.. what a pathetic, slow, non-network friendly piece of junk that lags, lags, lags, and crashes due to any old thing (try dragging a bunch of files around, and watch it go KABOOM!).. drag a bunch of songs from itunes to the finder, uh huh.. bunch of pictures from iphoto, you get the idea.

Argh, sure they aint no MS, but they aren't too great at programming, the really irritating thing about apple is they outright deny to tell the progress of anything -- nobody outside of apple knows even if the software engineers *KNOW* about the problems with safari (and other browsers that have the problem with a bunch of animated gifs) -- or the finder probs, or anything else, because APPLE IS SO DAMN SECRETIVE..

and why bother making a 10th update when they can charge you $129 for the 3rd time to fix problems that should have been fixed in 10.2? >_<

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Every time I switch from using a program on the Mac to the same program on XP I think to myself "Wow this is well designed, I'll be much more productive now..."

Do we really want it to go down like that?! I know I don't!

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by Link:

3. Safari, at 2 years old, is still buggy and slow -- that's almost how long it took MS to overcome netscape with their IE browser.. lol.
4. Finder, oh finder.. what a pathetic, slow, non-network friendly piece of junk that lags, lags, lags, and crashes due to any old thing (try dragging a bunch of files around, and watch it go KABOOM!).. drag a bunch of songs from itunes to the finder, uh huh.. bunch of pictures from iphoto, you get the idea.

I routinely move thousands of files and folders from Linux RH9, to Windows 2000 & 2003, to OS X server. I archive all of our projects from the network to DVD using Toast and OS X. Some of these projects have 500,000+ files. I don't get any lags either.

Sounds to me like an external hard drive spun down with the lag part. That I DON'T like. I wish they wouldn't spin down.

I network at home with my XP, Red Hat 9, OS X server and a few OS 9 boxes. All of them can connect to shares on my OS X rig.

So I don't get the idea.

[Love Calm Quiet]

About the DRIVE spin-down. You'd think that some kind 3rd party could create something like APM Tuner X for regulating head-parking on PowerBooks. I'm not even sure its developer distributes it any more, but I treasure my copy.

A similar to regulate internal *and* external drive functioning sure would be handy! (anybody here work with that level of pgming?)

[danengel]

One reason today's GUIs still don't feel snappy is that GUIs are not timing-bound. It is well known that a human considers 0.1 seconds as instantaneous, and any action longer than that must be indicated with a progress bar or something similar.

So when you click on a Preference pane, and it takes longer than 0.1 seconds to load, something else must be drawn in the meantime. Many actions already provide feedback, but not all. Why? Because today's GUIs do not provide such services, therefore a developer would have to take care of every single action, which is cumbersome.

[IamBob]

If they wanted to make System Preferences "feel" faster they'd start resizing the window right after you release the mouse, while the new pane was loading in the background. There'd be little difference in the overall time it takes but the user would think it was faster.

Windows tricks you in a similar manner (or used to..it's been a while); you can see the desktop right away so it must be fast, nevermind that that it takes a few seconds until it's really usable, you can see it *now*.

They proved that real speed doesn't matter - it's more about the perceived speed.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by IamBob:
If they wanted to make System Preferences "feel" faster they'd start resizing the window right after you release the mouse, while the new pane was loading in the background. There'd be little difference in the overall time it takes but the user would think it was faster.

Windows tricks you in a similar manner (or used to..it's been a while); you can see the desktop right away so it must be fast, nevermind that that it takes a few seconds until it's really usable, you can see it *now*.

They proved that real speed doesn't matter - it's more about the perceived speed.

Apple knows this well. Recall how in 10.0/10.1 the "metric of choice" for performance was number of bounces to start an app? Apple made the bounces take slightly longer in 10.1, and their optimization guidelines tell programmers to do as much setup/loading after stopping bouncing as possible to increase the perception of speed. Frankly I don't mind; perceived speed is quite important. Incremental loading in browsers is another example. It actually slows things down, but it feels faster and gets content on the page faster, so people like it.

Oh, in response to the thread in general: window resize performance is *significantly* improved in 10.4, at least on the machines I've tested (which isn't many). Still not as fast as OS9 window resize, but I think most of the criticism will be pointed towards other aspects of slowness in the future. Safari is also much faster. The other stuff I've tried feels similar to 10.3 in speed.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

What machines have you tested on? What video cards for that matter as well?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by IamBob:
If they wanted to make System Preferences "feel" faster they'd start resizing the window right after you release the mouse, while the new pane was loading in the background.

To do that, they'd need to know how big to make the window, and they need to load the prefpane to get that information. It's a chicken-and-egg situation.