Making Operating Systems Faster 667
mbrowling writes "In an article over at kernelthread.com Amit Singh discusses 'Ten Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster'. The theme seems to be that since you won't run into 'earth-shattering algorithmic breakthroughs' in every OS releases, what're you gonna do to bump your performance numbers higher? Although the example used is OS X, the article points out that Windows uses the same approach."
#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:4, Interesting)
OS designers shoudl also cut down with bloatware and trying to 'integrate' everything into the OS...
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to go through a bunch of settings to tweak it for "optimum performance" or whatever. Those should be enabled by default. The fancy stuff should be enabled easily but it should be up to the user to decide if they are turned on.
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:3, Insightful)
If Joe Public doesn't see "improvements" in the next generation of OS (like transparent windows, integrated internet browsing, etc.), then MS isn't going to convince many people to upgrade.
(And yes, the typical
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure there are some consumers who buy windows based on other criteria, but the vast majority of windows purchases are as a consequence of compatibility. If the actual statistics showed only 99% of retail windows purchases were as a result of pre-installation, that's about 0.999% less than I would have expected.
$.02
OS are not slow (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure - speed is good,
But the speed of application is simply this - they must be fast enough to be tolerable - no faster.
customers are not going to choose a product which makes drastic speed enhancements at the expense of features - provided those features can be run at reasonable speeds on available hardware.
Rather - there are features out their waiting for hardware speeds to see the limelight.
Voice recognition is often touted as waiting for higher CPU speeds.
So is Live ren
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me guess, you don't sell OS's right? To move software, you have to have all the pretty stuff that makes it look nice ON by default. Because that's what the general population cares about. They'll look at it and say "Wow, that's ugly, what a crappy OS."
When it's pretty, *you* will say "Wow, that's pretty, but it's slowing it down, let me go into control panels, and registry settings, and god knows what else to tweak my settings while I overclock the damn thing and stick it in a freezer." Then you'll bitch about it on Slashdot. Which is exactly what's supposed to happen.
Because *they* don't know how to turn it on, and *you* do know how to turn it off. So the burden, by default, is on you. It sucks, but hey, what else is new?
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.
Instead of clicking through a bunch of menus, finding the options, selecting radio buttons, etc, just disable it by default and ask at install/setup time "do you want the 'pretty version'? Be warned that it may affect system performance."
I think that eliminates the problems.
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's going to scare away non-technical users though.
MS, love 'em or hate 'em, is doing it right: appeal to the largest market segment with the default settings. Those people who want to improve performance are still be able to, but need to make the adjustments post-install.
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:4, Informative)
More uninformed opinion on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
What fucking hoops?
Right-click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings button.
Choose either "Best Performance" or "Best Appearance." Or check each option individually. What a non-issue.
If this was KDE, someone would have already answered with this, but because it's Windows, everyone just nods with the rest of the flock, "Baa, baa, yes, there are hoops to jump through, baa."
Speaking of KDE, talk about fucking hoops. You've got a completely horrible control center, with three different areas for changing the looks of things like window styles, widget styles, and so on. Why the hell isn't that all integrated into one configuration dialog? Oh, I forgot, ease-of-use is a criticism we only reserve for non-issues on the Windows platform like checking a radio button to get rid of a blue theme.
Re:More uninformed opinion on Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
The thing that drives me nuts is the constant harassment when you first install Windows XP for taking a tour and signing up for a
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows's idea of eye candy was that menus (and submenus) would all slowly fade in. The process of navigating deep into hierarchical menus was maddeningly slow--at least until everyone turned it off.
In osx, menus appear immediately, and then fade out after you select something. This is not only pretty, but functional: it gives you visual confirmation that you've selected a menu item, which can be helpful if
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ugh I hate this question. "Is it really necessary?"... is the type of question you can ask if you really want to make anything go away. "Is a >500mhz processor really necessary? Is a color monitor really necessary? Is being connected to the net 24/7 really necessary? Is a color printer really necessary when B&W is cheaper?" Who really cares so long as you can choose?
I'll answer your question, though: The more your UI gives you, the better reflexes you can build while using your machine. Have you ever reacted to a screen refresh? (Particularly in the olden days when the CPU had to fight harder...) Ever notice change in window focus simply by spotting the change in titlebar color? Etc.
I have no problem with people turning the fancy stuff off to boost performance, but the "is it really necessary" argument does not apply. The question is really "Do I want it?"
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:3, Interesting)
For a comparison you can run X with fvwm in (not in rootless mode) on MacOS X and see the difference. Or turn on terminal transpare
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason X runs slowly compared to Aqua is that Apple optimizes Aqua and allows harware acceleration (Quartz Extreme) and offloads lots of tasks to the GPU. I know of no X windowing system (aside from Apple's own implementation) that does this in OS X.
10.0 and 10.1 were dog-slow. Especially when you had a couple of hundred files in a folder. Jaguar was a huge increase in speed and performance. Quite a bit of that was due to the Quartz Extreme, but even my lowly 500MHz dual-USB iBook saw quite a boost from Jaguar and it was not able to use QE at all. Panther did very little to the iBook, except make it take forever to boot. I need to check on that bootcache issue.
My dual 800MHz Quicksilver is now almost three years old and I am still very happy with its performance. I expected to be wanting to replace it after two years, or after clock speeds have doubled, which is what I did when I used Wintel systems. Instead, I am considering keeping it around for the 10.4 release and at least another year or two. I attribute quite a bit of this to Apple's tweaks and performance enhancements of the OS.
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:4, Insightful)
What really bothers me, and it is the main reason I have stopped using Gnome, is this: Developers often assume that the moment the computers get fast enough that they can respond to fancy graphic requests using 100% of the CPU time, that this is the point where all reasonable people would stop complaining about the time they take up, and would be happy to have the little graphic toys unconditionally turned on at all times. This I call "bullshit". It's only when the fancy graphic requests end up taking a teeny, tiny fraction of the CPU time that it starts to become acceptable to leave them uncoditionally on.
I don't just want fast response from my UI when the system is under light load. I also want fast response from my UI when there's a runaway process I need to find and kill, or when I'm calculating some big raytrace in the background. So, yes, even in this day and age where you can't find a new computer with less than a Gigahertz clock rate, it is STILL worth it to provide the user with the ability to turn off features that require a good amount of CPU usage.
It's up to the owner of the computer to decide what to spend their CPU time on, not the maker of the UI.
Re:#1 thing Apple should do... (Score:5, Informative)
Faster? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Faster? (Score:4, Funny)
Phase 2: Re-release same software under a different name or version, only uncrippled. Claim massive performance improvements.
Phase 3: Profit as everyone upgrades/migrates to your product because of the great performance reviews
Hey, it seems to work for AOL, and I bet it could work for Microsoft!
=Smidge=
Re:Faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
XP is CRAZY slower than 2k.
XP is faster to come up to the desktop. However, it is still busy accessing the hard drive and loading stuff in the background. You still have to wait for the OS to quit loading itself before you can use anything. Microsoft's claim that XP is faster than 2K was based on the time to desktop, apparently not time to usability.
Once loaded, XP has an annoying habit of wanting to refresh the desktop from time to time. That slows things down even more.
Re:Faster? (Score:3, Informative)
If that's what you mean by "refresh", then that's actually Windows Explorer (which the desktop is an instance of) crashing followed by a background process realizing it died and starting it back up.
If that happens to you a lot then maybe you've installed some unstable shell extensions? Or maybe you're talking about somet
Re:Faster? (Score:4, Informative)
Um, no. XP gives you an 'Explorer just crashed' message when it tanks. Heh my coworker next to me is actually having this 'explorer likes to crash regularly' problem. When you lose your taskbar and all your icons in the system tray disappear, then you know Explorer has gone south and restarted.
Windows does have a 'refresh and rebuild the desktop' function. It's the same one they use to put your desktop icons back when you change video modes. (I.e. playing a game.) That's exactly what the person is describing.
Re:Faster? (Score:3, Informative)
This happens when you say, change your proxy settings (on or off, hit apply - bang, a refresh).
XP and OS X difference (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see how they can write an artice about how apple did this but to claim that Microsoft does it too. I don't see how. Unless Microsoft has improvements but enough of the new things they add slow it down so much more the gain is outweighted by the loss.
Re:XP and OS X difference (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft tends to spend more time figuring out ways to trick their users into *thinking* that things are faster even though it's actually taking as long, if not longer than previous versions. In this case, you've been tricked. Microsoft moved more stuff after the user is logged on. In other words, your system is still doing all of the things it used to do, plus probably more, it's just that you think it's done.
This is the difference between reality and perception. Microsoft tries very hard to address a user's perception, even at the cost of making reality slower. As is, in the above cited example, Microsoft gave you a login screen, whereby, you can do very little to nothing, but you're satisified thinking it's done, in spite of the fact (reality) that it's not. This means, attempting to do things right after the login screen will more than likely, take much longer than expected. They further hide this fact by making application startup and caching part of the OS boot sequence. Non-cached application startup, following initial login, will more than likely be painfully slow for non-trvial applications, at least until XP actually finishes it's startup.
Good or bad, you decide.
Re:XP and OS X difference (Score:3, Insightful)
Perception is what matters. I enjoy working at a computer that feels fast and responsive. If a
Re:XP and OS X difference (Score:4, Informative)
It's worth noting, if nothing more than FYI points, there are ways to drastically speed up Linux's start up times. They range from using LinuxBios to changing out the init scripts for scripts which are are to run highly parallel. Last I heard, the init scripts alone, take off 10s of seconds. It's just that people would rather have UNIX and Linux compatibility.
At any rate, I'm really not sure what you mean by, "USABILITY" being faster. If you mean the speed of the overall system as it relates to user responsiveness, then I suspect you have something wrong with your Linux configuration. Usabiity between the two systems should be equally high. Personally, my usability goes way down on Windows systems because it lacks so many of the powerful X features, out of the box anyways. But, I recognize that I'm not the typical win/linux user.
Lastly, I must say that I find it interesting that you find XP to be faster than 2k. XP is widely regarded as being slower (yes, with everything turned off) than 2k, as far as the user interface is concerned.
Some of these differences might center in how we're using our systems. My uses tend to be more of a workstation/desktop while you're may center completely around a MS-desktop solution.
Re:Faster? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone that thinks MS' OS, as a whole, is getting faster with each release is simply not living in our reality.
Reduce Bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
why does my 3ghz p4 choke on spellchecking a 50k doc with a 500mb text editor (Word2k3) ?
why does explorer choke on listing 10,000 files ?
why should i ever upgrade my word processing applications ? or can they type for me now ?
bah, innovation is dead, shame
One word: (Score:5, Interesting)
Largest bottleneck in any modern system. If you've never had the opportunity to use a 15krpm (or something faster) system, do it now. It flies... I don't care if it is Windows or what... it doesn't matter when you've got usable bandwidth to the biggest chunk of storage out there.
Re:One word: (Score:5, Funny)
That's two words.
Tom.
That's 2 words. (Score:5, Interesting)
My 2 words are RAM DRIVE. You think you can't justify 4Gb of RAM? Course you can.
Dedicate 2-3Gb of it to a ram drive and mount it as your root,
The difference in performance can be stunning.
Re:That's 2 words. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's 2 words. (Score:3, Informative)
Yup I have 2 copies of the apps in RAM. I have 4Gb of RAM, 2Gb of it as disk. My system doesn't swap, it still has 2Gb of RAM used as RAM and the perfor
Re:That's 2 words. (Score:3, Insightful)
And how is the performance compared to a system with 4GB of RAM in which the VM is left to its own devices?
There is no question that adding RAM makes a system faster. However, what is under debate is whether using RAM as a RAM drive instead of as cache is a better solution.
I liked another poster's suggestion of preloading the cache by cat'ing selected binaries to
Re:That's 2 words. (Score:4, Informative)
more info (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One word: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One word: (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe 10,000 RPM model would make a good boot drive with all of the home folders on the 250GB 7200 RPM drive. Then again, most file access would probably be from the slower drive. Eh.
Re:One word: (Score:5, Interesting)
5400 RPM 11 ms
7200 RPM 8 ms
10K RPM 5 ms
15K RPM 4 ms
Name another common mechanical device that has nearly tripled in speed in that period. (Source: seagate.com, all numbers are for 3.5" disks)
Re:One word: (Score:3, Informative)
Brother. There's something I forget to mention. - Pi Patel
Re:One word: (Score:5, Informative)
Most systems nowadays use a DMA-type system (Direct Memory Access) [pcguide.com] which streams data directly from disk to memory without involving the CPU much at all. The real slowdown is not the CPU cycles getting wasted, it's that the CPU can't work on the particular data you need until it is loaded. During the DMA loading process your CPU could be using tons of cycles on other tasks that are not waiting on data.
Smart read-ahead precaching and buffering attempts to ensure that your processes will not be data-starved. Yes, buffering can fall behind but overall it does considerably speed up a system.
Re:One word: (Score:3, Insightful)
When I click on Open Office or Netscape the CPU and I have to wait for the disk to finish the transfer before we can work. A 15k does it faster. The CPU cycles are wasted because on a desktop they're rarely used for something else. I'd agree with you if we were talking about a server.
pretty much (Score:4, Insightful)
Haven't read the article yet .. (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't looked into it for a while (mod me down for being uncertain if you like), but I seem to recall that there were serious leaps and bounds still left in OSX performance, with a change to the ABI register use, potentially, in the future
Re:Haven't read the article yet .. (Score:5, Informative)
Try running LinuxPPC on your mac some day, and you will see a huge difference in general snappiness.
I'm not saying OSX is un-usably slow, or even slow at all - heck my Rev. A tiBook, beaten and aged, is still all the computer I need, and I am very productive with it
On the register side of things, I can't for the life of me remember the full details, but I believe that the ABI for OSX only uses a sub-set of the PPC's full register set, and thus this means more swaps in/out
This is separate from AltiVec, which is an instruction set, not just a register setup
Re:Haven't read the article yet .. (Score:5, Informative)
Mach-O the ABI (not to be confused with Mach-O the executable format, which is totally different) accesses global addresses via PC-relative addressing. This design decision was made back in the NeXT days, and made a lot of sense at the time. Unfortunately, the PowerPC doesn't have any support for PC-relative addressing, so the only way to do it is to use several instructions and induce a pipeline stall in the process. Depending on how a program is written, this problem can mean up to a 10% speed hit.
That is the only brain-dead decision in the ABI that I'm aware of. It certainly makes good use of all registers, intelligently defines leaf procedures, and in general makes full use of the PPC architecture other than that one problem.
Altivec includes both instructions and processors. That is one of the things that makes Altivec really cool, is that it has a shitload of vector registers that are totally separate from the other registers, and don't interfere in any way.
Re:Haven't read the article yet .. (Score:3, Interesting)
But then the OS is 'doing less' too, so that's not really a good comparison. Linux GUI's are not as advanced as OS X at this point. They don't use a display postcript like system yet, don't yet have the same level of integration in terms of plugable software frameworks, etc etc
This is separate from AltiVec, which is an instruction set, not just a register setup
I'm still not really clear how it's di
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
optimizing Windows 2000/XP (Score:5, Informative)
The Only True Solution (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Am I Supposed To Be Impressed By Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
No. What takes genius is getting every combination of different motherboards, CPU, graphic cards, hard disks, etc and make it *ALL* work flawlessly and without any configuration at all. Just plug it in, turn it on and it's ready.
No updating drivers. No having to check for incompatibilities between different mobos and wifi chipsets (o
Re:Am I Supposed To Be Impressed By Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
Only one optimisation presented is related to hardware drivers, and it is cache of what kernel extensions will probably be loaded. Most of the optimisations (basically lots of caching and dynamic defragmentation) could be implemented in Linux, regardless of the amount of supported hardware.
Re:Am I Supposed To Be Impressed By Apple? (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, the next major revolution in OS design (and performance) will be from an exokernel [mit.edu] architecture. For those who aren't familiar with them, it's a completely radical and different approach to kernel design, the main idea behind it is seperate protection from management. If you really think about it, who (I use that term loosely) would know better what resources, scheduling, etc an application will need - the kernel, or the application itself.
Traditional kernel design techniques give the (pretty much) the entire management of resources to the kernel itself and hide it behind a HAL (hardware abstraction layer), allowing the application little to zero say in the matter. Exokernels throw that idea out of the window, taking a completely opposite view on the issue. Once you give the power to the application, it opens a whole new world of OS design.
It's really quite interesting, for more information on different kernel designs you can check out the Microkernel entry [thefreedictionary.com] at thefreedictionary.com
Speed Improvements on Old Hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
And the fact that I won't be discouraged from keeping 10.3 or 10.4 on that system if the next version doesn't support my hardware through annoying EULAs.
Hello? Linux, are you there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aparently, windows caches a bunch of stuff and has a bunch other little hacks that allows this. So why can't linux and the kde people do this. They've copied everything else, why not this?
Before you mod me as flamebait or troll, I switched over to linux a while ago and I have no intention on going back to windows. I'm not some ms fanboy bitching about my 10 minute experience with linux. All I'm saying is that here are some points where linux annoys me.
I've got one word for you... (Score:3, Informative)
What distro are you using?
Re:I've got one word for you... (Score:3, Informative)
A guide for gentoo, but the prelink program should be available for whatever distro you run.
Re:I've got one word for you... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have always found Mandrake to be very slow. I started with Mandrake 7
depends on the distro (Score:3, Interesting)
So, I know what you mean. And I've even noticed the same thing when trying ootb installs of ma
It's not just startup times (Score:3, Insightful)
In linux, one of the things that makes it seems really
Re:Hello? Linux, are you there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some efforts have been going into making KDE and KDE applications start up faster. Just the same, if it bothers you that much, don't run KDE or KDE applications. There are many window managers to pick from. Even GTK+ applications tend to load much faster than KDE applications (C versus C++, which is the root of one of the speed issues).
The overall performance of X and Linux will be faster and more responsive as the 2.6 kernel starts to become more common. A typical desktop user should see something like 20%-40% better performance and responsiveness. Even servers typically see 20%-30% improvement in almost all areas. Improvements like these, make applications like apache and samba, which already blew the doors off of Windows, that much more impressive.
Beyond that, start up time, in my mind, is a complete waste of time. Unlike Windows, Linux does not become unstable as you load more applications into memory. Start your computer and all of your applications (memory is cheap; tuning you swappiness as needed) and never have to load them again. I find that application crashes are rare; well, the ones I run. This means, rarely needing to restart your applications. As such, restart time is lost in noise. Furthermore, system stability can easily be measured in months or years as long as you're not running a closed source 3rd party driver (*cough* nvidia, ati).
Long story short, while I hear you and think you have a valid point, the long of it is, it's completely lost in the noise and really doesn't matter.
Re:Hello? Linux, are you there? (Score:5, Interesting)
The case of mshtml.dll, shdocvw.dll, urlmon.dll are a little different. These are *system DLLs* which can be used by any app, including IE (iexplore.exe) -- and the shell (explorer.exe). Explorer in particular will load urlmon if you visit FTP or WebDAV sites.
IIRC after login on a fresh Windows 2000 install, none of mshtml, shdocvw or urlmon are loaded.
Note that Working Set Detection/Maintenance on Windows can change this over time, but it will do so even for Firefox or any other non-MS app.
Btw, the real reason IE and Office start up quickly is because they are better engineered that the competition -- which is typically cross-platform portable code that is not particularly optimized for Windows. Reducing startup time is not necessarily a black art:
The true measure is how fast the app runs, not how fast it opens.
Not sure what your point is, but Open Office and Mozilla both run slower (_and_ open slower) than Office and IE on comparable hardware. Thankfully, Firefox opens slower than IE, but is almost as fast in use for most common tasks, which lets me use it for day-to-day browsing.
Re:Hello? Linux, are you there? (Score:3, Informative)
Furthermore, you assert that, "they are better engineered that the competition", which is completely false. It requires a superior engineered product to be crossplatform. In this case, IE has a speed advantage because it's NOT crossplatform, thusly allowing for more reasily available platform specific optimiz
Some tips on making your computer faster (Score:5, Informative)
2) Turn off some of the eyecandy. All those fades and whooshes and stuff don't actually do anything useful, they just consume CPU cycles and waste your time.
3) Use Ad Aware and SpyBot regularly to keep scumware out of your computer. I had to clean up a PC this morning which had stopped working because the BASTARDS at NewDotNet wrote some software which fucked the TCP/IP stack backwards.
4) Defrag regularly and run MSCONFIG to check what crap is sneaking back on to your Startup scripts.
BTW, Windows 3.1 sitting on MSDOS 6.2 ran like shit of a stick on my old P133. I wonder if/how it would run on a modern system?
um, no (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Some tips on making your computer faster (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know, but I ran Windows 3.1 on top of OS/2 3.0 and on a P133 and it worked perfectly, and its speed was acceptable. It must have run significantly faster on native DOS.
Re:Some tips on making your computer faster (Score:5, Informative)
Most of that is handed off to the GPU via Quartz Extreme.
HFS Plus already does that for me.
Prebinding not all good (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple, and other system vendors need to consider these types of management issues when making a change. Speed improvements are only good if they are "management friendly"
Missing Step (Score:5, Informative)
Stop adding services / features that are on by default, and you'll see a huge improvement in speed.
Re:Missing Step (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll simplify the comparison quiter a bit, but I think Apple decided to trade speed for distinguishing features. It must've worked, because people noticed.
Re:Missing Step (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparent Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Rus
Hard drive alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)
Macs used to be RAM disk bootable (Score:4, Informative)
Many moons ago, it was possible to make a RAM disk on a Mac, install an OS on it, and (warm) boot from it. It would remain in memory and work perfectly as long as the computer wasn't shut down-- it could only be restarted. I tried it once or twice just to check it out, and the computer booted and ran like lightning compared to the normal hard drive boot.
One of the utility suites back then (Central Point Utilities?) even had a feature where the machine would boot from a RAM disk with the utils on it, to fix the occasional really serious Mac problem.
Booting from a RAM disk stopped being possible after Apple made a hardware change in newer Macs that had the side-effect of making the RAM non-persistent through warm-reboots (i.e., your RAM disk would go bye-bye). I forget exactly when it happened... perhaps after the first generation of Power Macs, when they went from using NuBus to using PCI?
Here's another interesting fact. The Macintosh Classic, released in 1990, had System 6.0.8 (IIRC) burned into its ROM-- you could boot it disklessly from the OS in ROM by holding down Command-Option-O-X at startup. Nobody really knows what that feature was intended for.
~Philly
Re:Entire OS on RAM drive (Score:3, Interesting)
c) Have a shutdown script that will always run on shutdown. From what I understand, Windows has more then one shutdown (there's at least 2: the "slow" shutdown you get from Start -> Shutdown, and the "fast" shutdown you get from pushing the soft power button on your case).
Making Linux Faster (Score:3, Funny)
Download yourself the latest cutting-edge gcc from the 3.5.0 branch on CVS and do a make bootstrap. Install this over your original C compiler.
Get the latest 2.6.7-preX kernel from kernel.org and configure it with no modules: everything build it. Modules slow you down.
Enable all the EXPERIMENTAL drivers. They are ususally much faster than the old ones that may have been in the kernel now for 6 or more months.
When you have saved your configuration, hack the top level Makefile to add "-O9 -fomit-instructions" in the CFLAGS macro.
time gmake -j64 bootstrap. Even if you have a single CPU system, building with lots of processes in parallel is faster because it soaks up CPU idle time when waiting on I/O operations.
Enjoy.
faster use of preference files: TtoF (Score:5, Interesting)
The earliest versions of the software did not convert key preference/calibration/setup files into internally stored numerical values -- instead, anytime the code needed a calibration/setup value, it went to the file, read it, and converted it. Needless to say, that "feature" was quickly corrected.
That's not as bad as an early VAX image processing program that prepped newly allocated file space by setting all the bytes to zero, one byte at a time.
How I would improve the speed of the system... (Score:4, Insightful)
This holds especially for applications, but it definitely applies to operating systems as well. Most modern software is simply bloated beyond belief.
BeOS, by all accounts, is a full-fledged OS, and it takes a Pentium (not Pentium 4, but original Pentium) 15 seconds to boot it, including the GUI. What's up with Windows and OS X taking over a minute on hardware that is several times faster?! On Linux, you could at least skip most of the init stuff and boot in seconds (likely mostly pauses that you have to keep for faulty PC hardware).
Then there's the libraries. glibc is well over 5 megabytes. You are not going to convince me that isn't bloatware. If all that code doesn't eat CPU time, it at least eats memory, which could lead to more swapping. GTK is also typical - ever resize a GTKWindow? It's visibly slow! That doesn't happen to Windows 3.11 on my grandpa's 486! What is that code doing?!
Applications... Firefox is what? 10 megabytes installed size? And that's a light weight browser. What? We need 10 megabytes on top of libc, X, and GTK for parsing a simple markup language and rendering those widgets? Excuse me! Even lynx is hundreds of kilobytes, and it mostly just reads data from a socket, strips the tags, and spits it straight out. What the fsck? Say "OpenOffice.org" or Java and I'll explode.
All we have today is bloatware. I'm *really* tempted to roll my own OS and applications, and I am going to have a shot at it this summer.
Re:How I would improve the speed of the system... (Score:4, Interesting)
Application memory space during runtime? 15MB.
I remember when Borland spend a lot of effort to optimize their Quattro Pro spreadsheet so that it was monitoring it's own memory usage down to 512 byte increments. It would start discarding portions of itself that it no longer needed.
Those days are over, for sure.
Easy! (Score:3, Funny)
At least, that's what I heard on IRC. Oh, and use about a gram of silicone grease on the northbridge - that'll speed up your RAM.
Opinion from an ex-microsoftie (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking elsewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Try running Windows NT on a new Intel system (say 2-3GHz) for example - it'll run blazingly fast, and with software versions from around the same time it'll still do much of what everyone wants to do - email, web, office, graphics manipulation - but really much faster - things will load practically instantly, rather than after five or ten seconds, and it's all still nice and graphical and everything, just like people want.
Many (but not all) XP machines I meet still seem to take 2-10 seconds even to do basic things such as open My Computer, Internet Explorer or a properties dialog, which one has to wonder is worth the wait for the extra functionality - basically lots of drivers, a couple of extra bundled programs and supported file formats, minor changes to the interface and the other couple of things I'll get flamed for forgetting. Microsoft have no doubt made some improvements to the kernel between releasing NT and releasing XP, but most still seem to be no faster to use, if not slower.
I maintained a school network up until last year which still ran NT and KDE2 on around 2/3 of systems, and then when my replacement went and wiped everything out and replaced it with new machines running XP (with an enormous cost to them), many staff told me that there were lots of things that didn't work any more, and there'd be frequent outages of the entire network.
On a Linux+X system, running X on its own (i.e. just the one program you want) or with a light window manager (fvwm or whatever) is again noticeably faster than running Gnome or KDE. Loading Mozilla or OpenOffice.org means loading the entire frameworks they run in, and often we're loading up a great deal of functionality we don't want in that particular situation. I think a good example is Dillo [dillo.org], a web browser written entirely in C that just does the basics (launches in around 0.7 seconds on this Athlon 700 system, compared to Mozilla, which takes around 5, and Mozilla Firefox, which isn't far off that) - it'd be interesting to see if they could add things like CSS or SSL support and still keep it fast.
FS Journaling (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, journaled filesystems are generally noticeably (one might say significantly) slower than non-journaled ones.
The only 'performance' gain one gets from journaling is after an unclean dismount (a crash or power outage). The system will boot up much quicker, but that's it.
Re:FS Journaling (Score:3, Informative)
As you'll see from this benchmark [macnn.com] Apple's implementation of journaling has generally negligible effect on performance, and some operations do in fact run faster.
OS/2 Warp (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple II series rules on boot-up times (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Press Ctrl+break (? it's been a looong time since I used one).
3. You're done.
It takes under 2 seconds. Show me a "new" machine (see: desktop,server or notebook from the last 5 years) that actually boots that fast, please! (not just turns on the monitor)
Re:Apple II series rules on boot-up times (Score:4, Informative)
Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple computers do not hibernate. Rather, when they "sleep", enough devices (in particular, the dynamic RAM) are kept alive (at the cost of some battery life, if the computer is running on battery power). Consequently, upon wakeup, the user perceives instant-on behavior: a very desirable effect.
I don't know how they can be proud of not hibernating. Windows can sleep OR hibernate. Although being a Mac household, hibernation is one reason I MIGHT consider windows for my next laptop. The ability to get back to all you have left around with your laptop hibernating for a few days unplugged and still have full battery power when you open it up is VERY nice.
Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:3, Informative)
The APM hibernation that the laptop's own BIOS implements works fine in FreeBSD, though. Wish Windows didn't take over that functionality.
Easy, economic solution (Score:5, Funny)
device=emm386.exe noems
files=40
buffers=10
smartdrv c+ 10000
Prebinding is worst misfeature of MacOS X (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't understand why it doesn't just leave the prebinding to be done the first time the program is run.
Two kinds of speed (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two kinds of speed: things that are fast and things that feel fast.
The article and the comments here on /. are mainly talking about true benchmarkable speed. Things that are fast.
But some apps don't really need to be fast. They just have to feel fast. This holds true for most interactive applications. It's all about psycholigy with this one.
Ever wondered why Windows Explorer builds up its icons from the right bottom to the top left? Doesn't matter in real speed, but it just feels faster. Your brain just isn't used to this flow: usually you read from the top left to the bottom right, or you read from the top right to the bottom left. Your eyes immediately focus on the spot your brain expects the icons to appear. But instead the appear in the opposite corner. By the time your brain figures out it has been tricked, the window is already full of icons.
More tricks: ever wondered why windows wastes memory by trying to have some free memory ready all the time? It makes starting new apps faster. But on average the system is slower.
In the Unix world there is only raw, benchmarkable speed. And that's why KDE and Gnome are slow. They aren't slow, they just feel slow.
Um, speaking of Mac OS, that's not true for it (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't take my word for it -- take Ars Technica's [arstechnica.com] review of Panther for example:
Re:You want fast! (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no point removing features to reduce the mythical "install bloat" if you can't actually do anything with the system.
Relying on shared libraries rather than stand alone binaries actually improves performance, by reducing memory usage when lots of processes use the libraries, and allows optimisations of the libraries to speed up all the apps that depend on them.
Small does not necessarily imply fast. For example, a project I work
Re:Optimize Windows... (Score:5, Funny)
Step 2: There is no step 2!!!