OS X performance

Read an industry article recently that summed up the state of affairs as:

Microsoft needs to focus on security issues

Intel needs to focus on cpu power effeciency / control

Apple needs to optimize its core OS for performance


The first 2 are obvious ones -- anyone have any comments on the Apple issue -- any history here ??

As much as I dump on MSFT, I have to give them credit for really focusing on both boot times and operational optimizations in XP (compared to their older products)

Ex_PC_Puke said:

Apple needs to optimize its core OS for performance


The first 2 are obvious ones -- anyone have any comments on the Apple issue -- any history here ??

Click to expand...

Yep, OSX runs on top of Darwin which is really just Unix, the boot up time for such boxes is always relatively slow but at present all my Macs (form my 1Ghz G4 iMac to a twin G5 PowerMac) easily boot up inside the time it takes my PC to boot XP-Pro, they also shut down quicker and sleep/awake faster.

I'm not sure what else could be speeded up, my iMac is occasionally a little sluggish (nowhere near as bad as my PC though) but the twin G5 just does everything instantly.

OSX 10.1 was the first I played with and it was Sloooooowwwww, in fact I began to think the mouse pointer default shape was a round colourful spinning thing, 10.2 was a little better and 10.3 was really very useable but 10.4 has breathed new life into my iMac and finally unleashed the power of the beast in my twin G5. Maybe Apple can do even better (more 64 bit optimisations maybe?) in later releases but I for one am quite happy at present.

Amen-Moses

I guess my thoughts here are (as an ex-corporate geek) - I would expect the fine folks at Apple (or MSFT) to not just be adding features - fixing issues when they make a major OS release .... I would expect some level of performance optimizations in the core (kernal) or I/O base code.

For example I should be able to take an iMac - wipe it clean with a panther install and then benchmark the system - wipe it clean with a tiger install and benchmark it and see a few % improvement in some areas be they memory reads/writes - disk IO - video - etc.

There are always optimizations to be made somewhere in the SW stack