10 Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster

bariswheel writes "This kernelthread article seeks to investigate further to the inner core of OS X and the improvements therein. The subtopics are the following: BootCache, Kernel Extensions Cache, Hot File Clustering, Working Set Detection, On-the-fly Defragmentation, Prebinding, Helping Developers Create Code Faster, Helping Developers Create Faster Code, Journaling in HFS Plus, and Instant-on."

Obvious Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

The website even has a link to the old slashdot story: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/06/03 /130214.shtml [slashdot.org]

Pointless Effects

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple is going to bother optimizing other stuff on the OS, they should at least give you a way to turn off some of the extras when it comes to the GUI.

I don't need high resoution icons, drop shadows, dragging window effects, minimize effects...etc. In windows land, you can turn most of these eyecandy effects off and performance is greatly improved. You'd think that Apple would have considered this when releasing a computer with 256mb of ram on the base model (G4 mac mini). I love the computer, but it is SLOW.

Re:Dupe several years later?

[bondsbw]

Parent is flamebait? Come on, now... 'rg3' should probably be hired as a Slashdot admin to keep up with such things.

I'm quite impressed he or she can remember so far back. The current posters often miss dupes within the same day.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

[repruhsent]

Believe it or not, not everyone who reads Slashdot are GNU/Hippies. Some of us like to do something with our machines other than recompile software.

Re:I love OS X

[kc0re]

Um.. ANYTHING installed over Windows ME is an improvement. Hell, Going backwards would be an improvement.

Re:Pointless Effects

[ioErr]

I don't need high resoution icons

Those you can turn off. Just set the Finder to use 32x32 pixel icons. icns resources generally contain several versions of an icon, 128x128, 48x48, 32x32, and 16x16 pixels. If you use one of the small versions then the system won't waste time scaling the icon, or memory holding a big bitmap. I doubt you'll see much gain though.

But it's not in Apple's interest to let you turn off too much of the eye-candy. They want Mac OS to have its distinct look, and they are are in the business of trying to sell you newer hardware.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

[Runefox]

You don't have to be a "GNU/Hippie" to use Linux, and there are plenty of reasons to do so, as well, not the least of which is that it's free and it'll run on that old P166 you bought over a decade ago. The "GNU/Hippies" you speak of are largely the guys who spend all day tweaking this and that to make sure the next release of your operating system is secure, productive, and pleasing to the eye, which you might notice Linux is becoming more and more, especially with user-oriented flavours like Ubuntu. The main difference is, the guys at Apple get paid for what they do, and the guys who contribute to Gnome do not. As such, Apple is a little further ahead, especially since their UI is more closely integrated into the core of the OS than Linux' is (and they don't have to contend with different flavours of hardware). Anyway, in closing, flamebait.

Re:Pointless Effects

[St. Arbirix]

In Windows land, the desktop eye-candy isn't hardware accelerated. Turning off a lot of the OSX eye-candy would only serve to idle the graphics hardware rather than making the computer respond any faster.

Hopefully, Microsoft's Aero will prove this point.

Re:Pointless Effects

[pohl]

those GUI 'extras' are not what is making a 256MB G4 slow. Rather, it would be the fact that the machine is going to be constantly swapping out to disk. Get more RAM.

Re:Linux

[Kristoffer Lunden]

Have to agree here - at the same time as I do get more and better applications to play with, the machine actually performs better for each update. The whole last 6 months (one release period) for Gnome has seen a lot of focus on improving speed and it shows when comparing for instance Breezy and Dapper.

OTOH, I guess MS is driving the hardware industry forward too, which is not all bad.

Re:Dupe several years later?

[Midnight Thunder]

If its three years later its a refresher, not a dupe :)

I never saw this article first time round, so I don't mind it getting posted again.

Re:Pointless Effects

[pohl]

Not knowing much about you, the only thing that comes to mind is to stop externalizing blame. I don't have much to go on here, though.

Re:I love OS X

[Homestar Breadmaker]

Err, please stop fueling my silent rage.

Re:I love OS X

[Kenshin]

I installed Windows ME when it came out.

It came off my machine after a month, and I went back to Win98 SE.

Yes, it WAS that bad.

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

[shmlco]

"But they threw out the baby with the bathwater when they ditched MacOS."

As long as you're waxing rhapsodic about that OS "written from the ground up in the early 80s to be graphical", you might also remember that it was also written from the ground up to be B&W, single-threaded, single-tasking, use fixed-size memory spaces, and totally without any form of internal or user-based security.

Any of those things that were added on later were major hacks to the system. Some, like the non-preemptive MultiFinder (switcher) were ingenious hacks, but hacks nontheless. Or are you saying a modern OS should swap out hundreds of shared low-level global variables on every context switch?

Or that, since you mentioned HLOCK, why a modern OS should have a handle-based non-protected fixed-patition-sized memory system, itself probably responsible for half the memory allocation/corruption bugs and crashes in any given Mac application. Or why a program needs me to allocate more memory to it when there's a half-gig free?

Or perhaps you can explain just why the system resource and process-slicing allocation kernal of a modern OS needs to be "graphical" from the ground up? Or conversely, why graphics, networking, file management, and other subsystems should not be layered on top of a rock-solid base?

I mean, if you really take the time to actually think about it, you might find that the "good old days" are in fact nothing but a fond, hazy memory... and far removed from the truth.

Re:Pointless Effects

[Anonymous Coward]

and the effort to produce most of those visual effects is done by the GPU, hardware that would otherwise be idle.

Unless of course it isn't, like when the job you're doing involves 3d rendering.

On a related note, performance in general hardly matters at all under light loads. Anything can run a web browser. Meanwhile, it is exactly under heavy loads when one might want to get more performance by turning off unnecessary effects.

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

[madsenj37]

My machine can run both OS 9 and OS 10.1+. OS 9 is not faster. Why? I have dual processors, which OS9 does not use very well, or I should say, much at all. OS 9 is dog slow compared to 10.2 and up.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

[repruhsent]

How is Linux so productive? I know of people who have spent literally months tweaking their system to the point where it's usable. I know of several in fact who have had to Google for days and weeks even to find patches to enable support for commonly used formats like MP3. You can argue about the legality of using an MP3 encoder/decoder on Linux all day long, but the fact is that if you spend all of your time trying to get your system to work with the files and software you want, it's NOT productive, in any meaning of the word.

Personally, every single person I have talked to is more productive on a Mac than they are on an Ubuntu box (and most of my friends are computer science students like myself, so it's not like we're talking about Mom and Dad here). Ubuntu has come a long way toward making Linux a productive system, but as long as there are elitists, free software evangelists who refuse to support common formats on moral grounds and apologists (like you) fueling the development of the system, it will never be as useful, productive or versatile as a vendor-supported operating system like Mac OS X or even Windows XP.

Re:20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do

[John Allsup]

I fully agree with network sharing support. Also, interoperability across the network with Linux boxes is a disaster so far as I'm concerned. (I tried it but found it to be a hit and miss affair as to whether NFS or SMB connections worked properly. Back in 10.3, accessing a SAMBA share would crash the finder some of the time!)

The .DS_Store problem seems to be well known, but since it is not a problem with mac only networks, I imagine that Apple couldn't care less.

I've yet to try the mac mini on an apple only network, but interoperability with other machines such as my linux box is something I've given up on. It's quicker to send files with a USB key and all else I just work around.

I'd like an 'open command line prompt here' as well, and I dislike the inability to add things to the right-click menus.

The lack of Alt-F etc. shortcuts for accessing menus is my major gripe compared to Windows -- this is one thing I do miss.

Finally, the inability to properly uninstall applications seems to me to be a major oversight on the part of Apple. Sticking everything in /Library or the user's ~/Library is at fault here, as is the apparently user-friendly idea of having self contained apps in the /Applications folder. Having more domains (or whatever you want to call them) so that, e.g. Audio apps could go in one domain (Library+Applications folder) and Office apps in another, possibly with things like Adobe's CS suite in its own private application group would make things easier, but I don't know what the best solution to program organisation is, and I'm sure that neither MacOSX nor Windows have got it right so far.