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Put both responses in one email to save people from having to delete two useless posts ... At 13:17 -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). >> 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. That's beside the point, and is a whole separate rant. :) >> 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. Again, you are missing the point. I am talking about raw speed apart from problems with multitasking. I said this already, quite clearly. Most users only use a single app at once, and that single app is usually doing only one thing at a time. In such cases, the apps won't have significant multitasking issues. It is that speed that I am talking about, as previously stated. Indeed, Mac OS is often FASTER in this sort of use, because the frontmost app is allowed to monopolize ALL the CPU. It's what cooperative multitasking was designed for. If you want to go off on a religious multitasking war, though, I am not interested. :) The one glaring exception to what I'm talking about is networking. Yes, networking on Mac OS X is tons faster. Happy? :p >Like, oh, >benchmarks. And that's because the OS is not involved. Right, the OS is not involved. Right. Uh-huh. Sorry, I thought you actually had a serious point here. You see, when I grant that apps can be slowed down because of cooperative vs. preemptive multitasking and then go on to say how Mac OS, apart from such things as these, is not slower, and you go on to assert it is slower specifically because of those excluded reasons, I get confused. >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. That would be a nice way to sum up, if that were the only thing the OS did. When I call a sleep() function, for example, it is the OS that is providing that, both in the API and in what the API does when it is called. So we can be clear and end this uselessness: it's this level that I am talking about, program intereacting with OS to perform operations, which is not slower, and is sometimes faster, on Mac OS. Those operations are slowed significantly when the OS needs to cooperate with other processes, and this effect can be significantly minimized through careful and knowledgable management of the running processes (for example, not running MSIE). At 12:59 -0500 2003.09.08, Peter da Silva wrote: >> It's not that you don't notice the multitasking, it's that it is *not >> important* for most users. > >It doesn't matter if multitasking is important to them or not, the lack of >any operating system *at all* below the level of the GUI causes all kinds >of effects that they can't help but notice. Well, of course, there IS multitasking, cooperative intead of preemptive. But there is also an OS below the GUI. Not sure exactly why you say there isn't. Shorthand for saying you need the GUI to do most things? >I'll be sitting there working >on something, and the whole computer comes to a complete halt because some >component I neither know nor care about, something that's not even visible >on the screen, something that shouldn't even be in any critical path, decides >it doesn't want to cooperate. When I point this out I get "that's OK, it >came back after a couple of seconds, it's not like it crashed". Yes, which is why people like me, who knew their systems very well, kept such components out of the System Folder. Again, yes, this is a problem with the OS, but it didn't significantly harm the average user. >OS X doesn't act like that. Yes, sometimes some program will put up a moded >grab and I'll get a few seconds of lollypop in that app. VERY rarely, if I >have a few dozen applications running and a backup going on I *often* see significant system slowdown because of one misbehaving process on Mac OS X. >> When you are browsing the web or reading email, it simply didn't matter. > >Like hell it didn't. The only reason it didn't was because someone spent a >grand or two on their Mac and they'd lose face if they admitted even to >themselves that under the covers the emperor had no clothes. No, it is because to me it *actually didn't happen* because I know how to keep the machine running well. If you can call me a liar, I can call you ignorant, right? :) >And there's a lot of failures that people put down to memory protection that >are obviously, when I watch them happen, scheduling problems. That's nice for you and those people. >> For single-user machines -- and I was a power user on Mac OS, doing many >> things at once -- cooperative multitasking simply wasn't a problem for most >> users, including me. > >Sure it was. You just got used to it. You really look stupid by telling me what I experienced. Really, you do. Just a helpful hint. 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. >> >And takes a fricking age to wake up again when I open it again. > >> That's more of a function of your hardware, in my experience (I've had just >> about every laptop Apple's made since the Wall Street, and the newer >> hardware + software [including a Lombard/500 with Mac OS 9.2.x]) that woke >> up quite speedily. > >Look, I'm running FreeBSD on a 166 MHz laptop and I have it set to hibernate >to disk, not just go to standby, because it takes it less than 20 seconds >to restore when I bring it up again. It can take another half a minute to >reinitialise the wireless card if I have it in, but that happens in the >background... I don't see it, I do get a brief GUI freeze if it needs to >reinitialise the hardware, but that's about all. I am not saying the machine is slow. That was not the statement. I am saying it did not wake from sleep quickly. It's not about CPU speed. And note that while even some speedy G3s woke slowly from sleep in Mac OS 8, the speed was cut significantly for certain hardware combinations with Mac OS 9. My PowerBook G4 wakes from sleep faster in Mac OS than Mac OS X sometimes, and usually about the same speed (although devices can slow it down significantly). -- Chris Nandor pudge@xxxxx.xxx http://pudge.net/ Open Source Development Network pudge@xxxx.xxx http://osdn.com/There's stuff above here
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