Re: mac schmack

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: mac schmack
Date: 19:17 on 08 Sep 2003
> >People keep telling me how classic Mac OS didn't suck all that bad. I don't
> >understand what they're smoking. Now the fastest thing I've played with OS
> >9 on is a G3/700, but after all that's only something like six or eight times
> >as fast as my own laptop which has no problems with FreeBSD, Windows 2000,
> >and BeOS... so unless there's something in the G4 that magically extracts
> >all the suck I have to conclude they're on something pretty heavy.

> The UI in Mac OS is significantly faster than Mac OS X.

Quickdraw is faster than Quartz, yes.

That's the ONLY way in which Mac OS 9 is faster than Mac OS X, when you're
comparing the same operations. The multitasking is more efficient with lower
overhead. The memory management is better, with lower overhead and better
cache access. The only places OS 9 is faster than OS X are when rendering
the display is the bottleneck (which is an overwhelming amount of the time,
which is why OS 9 is usable on machines that can't run OS X), or when you're
running different applications altogether.

> And things like compiling software etc. is as fast or faster in Mac OS
> (as long as you don't have other things doing things, and not including
> "cheats" like predictive compiling in XCode ...).

What you're saying here is that Code Warrior is faster than GCC. Well, yes,
I'd believe that. What's that got to do with the OS?

> No, it's not.  It is faster in some areas, such as loading apps that can
> take advantage of prebinding.

Prebinding is a shuck. There's something *wrong* with Apple's shared library
design if you have to pre-build the symbol cache.

> It may be faster at IO, one some machines.

Unless there's a driver problem on OS X, OS X can not help but beat OS 9
on IO because it never has to defer IO in favor of computation, *and* the
impact of non-polled I/O on computation is negligable.

> On others, maybe not.  And as noted, Mac OS beats Mac OS X in the UI.  In
> most places, they have the same speed.

The only place they have the same speed is when running a single application
that is computation-bound, with negligable GUI or OS interaction. Like, oh,
benchmarks. And that's because the OS is not involved.

Otherwise, Mac OS has an overwhelmingly faster GUI, albeit with badly
unpredictable behaviour, and Mac OS X has the edge everywhere else.

> Often people think Mac OS is slow
> because of bad extension crap, or because many apps/extensions are running
> simultaneously and competing for processor time, but while that IS a poor
> reflection on the OS, certainly, it is not the same thing as saying the OS
> is slow.

But, Chris, the only time the OS is even relevant is when an application
is interacting with people, devices, or other applications. looking at
applications that aren't limited by the OS tells you nothing about how
fast the OS is. When the OS *does* have to do its job, managing I/O and
interactions between applications and utilities, it falls on its face in
every area but one: rendering the user interface.

There's stuff above here

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