Re: mac schmack

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From: Chris Nandor
Subject: Re: mac schmack
Date: 22:06 on 08 Sep 2003
At 15:29 -0500 2003.09.08, Peter da Silva wrote:
>> >That's the ONLY way in which Mac OS 9 is faster than Mac OS X, when you're
>> >comparing the same operations.
>
>> No, it isn't.  Sending Apple events is faster in Mac OS, for example (on my
>> machines, Mac OS 9.2.x and Mac OS X 10.2.x, anyway).
>
>I did not know that, but I can see how that could be the case. That's going to
>be a result of memory protection.
>
>Could you comment on where this might be a bottleneck?

During the sending of Apple events, where you wait for a reply, just like
any communication.

You probably won't notice it except during benchmarks, and the difference
now might now be as much as it was the last time I checked.  I've not
bothered to do any detailed analysis, because I don't care enough.


>I've been doing realtime control systems for over 20 years. I've measured
>the OS overhead on machines all the way back to the PDP-11... if you can
>show a situation where a cooperative system is more than a percent or so
>faster than a preemptive system for a single active application then I can

No, I couldn't.  My claim was not that Mac OS is significantly faster in
any such cases.  I was responding to your claim that "OS X is so much
faster than OS 9 everywhere else."


>> Yes, which is why people like me, who knew their systems very well, kept
>> such components out of the System Folder.
>
>That is an accomodation to the problem.

Yes, as taking a shower is an accomodation to the problem of smelling bad.
I don't consider taking a shower a workaround or accommodation, personally.


>my vision and my knees. To say that this doesn't "significantly harm the
>average user" seems just the least bit jesuitical to me.

It's an observation borne of about 16 years of using Macs and knowing
thousands of Mac users.  *shrug*


>I occasionally see "significant system slowdown" in OS X myself. I've come
>to an accomodation with it... but in terms of accomodation this is like
>comparing a sore finger with multiple amputations.

No.  You keep talking about Mac OS as though extension conflicts and
running a lot of background junk is how it was meant to be.  It isn't.  Not
using a lot of extensions is not amputating anything, unless you happened
to graft on a third arm that shouldn't have been there to begin with.

Of course, Mac OS is flawed in memory protection, and of course,
cooperative multitasking brings with it various problems.  And yes,
preemptive multitasking is superior.  But for a single user computer, where
it is not filled with crap, and broken programs, cooperative multitasking
works just fine, including in Mac OS.


>> Now, I guess I should clarify and say it wasn't an "active" problem, or
>> somesuch.  Of course it was a problem, but it was a problem that I worked
>> around.  I didn't merely learn to live with it, I tuned my system to
>> decrease, and mostly negate, its negative effects.
>
>Because here you're saying, in a lot of the same words, exactly the same thing
>that I was saying and that you're objecting to.

Except not.  You were describing behaviors and saying they happened to me,
that I was saying it didn't in order to save face.  You were wrong, and I
said so.  These problems *actually didn't happen to me* any more often than
they happen to me on Mac OS X, because I took care of what I was running.

-- 
Chris Nandor                      pudge@xxxxx.xxx    http://pudge.net/
Open Source Development Network    pudge@xxxx.xxx     http://osdn.com/

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