10 Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster

bariswheel writes "This kernelthread article seeks to investigate further to the inner core of OS X and the improvements therein. The subtopics are the following: BootCache, Kernel Extensions Cache, Hot File Clustering, Working Set Detection, On-the-fly Defragmentation, Prebinding, Helping Developers Create Code Faster, Helping Developers Create Faster Code, Journaling in HFS Plus, and Instant-on."

I love OS X

OS X is the only OS I"ve ever installed that subsequent versions speed up my older computers. Amazing... I'm waiting for an Apple Intel Tower and I'll retire my G4 Tower.

Damn ADC interface.. what am i to do with this big ass cinema display?!?!!?

Re:I love OS X

Clearly you've never installed Windows 2000 over Windows ME.

Re:I love OS X

Um.. ANYTHING installed over Windows ME is an improvement. Hell, Going backwards would be an improvement.

Re:I love OS X

Indeed. Windows ME was a crime against humanity.

Re:I love OS X

I installed Windows ME when it came out.

It came off my machine after a month, and I went back to Win98 SE.

Yes, it WAS that bad.

Re:I love OS X

"1. faster booting"

Yep, comes in handy when the OS can't handle a day or two of uptime. Windows 2000 was so much more stable, and didn't take all that long to boot. Longer then ME, yes, but I bet you wasted more time watching the boot screen then 2000 users did.

"2. disk scan ran inside windows and was a million times faster"

Except that ME wasn't smart enough to multitask when scanning a disk. So that frequent bootup disk scan you saw was always interrupted several times when it tried to start, and if some bootup process accessed the disk say every minute or two, it would never finish. I think the majority of ME users just cancelled that any time it popped up. Of course those of us who skipped ME and went from 98 to 2000 started enjoying journaled filesystems and had no need for the disk scan to run inside windows.

"3. native .zip support"

Zip support that is horribly implemented. Lets walk you through a multipart wizard to extract this file, or present it as an explorer window that lets you run things directly out of, but causes most programs to freak out when you try this. I still don't use the built in Zip support on XP even though it has been slightly improved. Running things inside a Zip directly is as bad as compressing the hard drive for more space.

ME sucked. It was simply a quick release from Microsoft for the consumer market to get something new out, since all the "consumer friendly" features didn't make it into NT 5, err, I mean Windows 2000. For MS to go completly backwards and ship another archaic 16/32 bit mess of DOS based code after Windows 2000 was just silly. I feel pitty on anyone who actually paid for a copy of ME.

Linux

Linux gets faster too.

Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was a pretty big jump in speed. I just upgraded to the latest KDE and a bunch of other updates, and got another performance jump. Once they shake the bugs out of the Radeon drivers for X.org, I'll get accelerated X, and another big speed boost.

In fact, of the major OSs, it's pretty much only Windows that keeps getting slower.

Re:Linux

Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was a pretty big jump in speed.

That's true, but don't expect another jump of that relative magnitude anytime soon. The 2.6 introduced a new scheduling algorithm that boosted speed and concurrency significantly. When your scheduler goes from an O(n) to an O(1) algorithm, implements CPU affinity, and eliminates lock contention for the run queue, the speed boost is significant. I guess there could be filesystem improvements or paging improvements in the pipeline that could provide significant speed boosts, but I kind of doubt they would be as critical as that brilliant new scheduling algorithm.

OTOH the inter-version speed boosts in OS X have been due to more subtle tweakage, except perhaps for speed boosts related to launchd, and have been more incremental in nature than the anomalous 2.4-2.6 improvement.

I guess my point is that the 2.4-2.6 improvement is more of a leap than it is a trend, where OS X's improvements have been less revolutionary and more evolutionary. I hope Linux continues to improve in performance, but it's very possibly going to suffer from bloat down the road that could offset some performance improvements. It's unrealistic to expect the performance improvements to continue along the lines of 2.4-2.6, in any case. OS X is still lagging in performance, so it's even more imperative that it continue its trend. Hopefully the researchers at Apple will soon find a revolutionary improvement on the order of the 2.6 scheduler to catch up a bit.

Re:I love OS X

Damn ADC interface.. what am i to do with this big ass cinema display?!?!!?

As you may or may not be aware, the ADC connection provides a DVI signal, USB port, AND power. The display has no power pack, and gets its juice from the computer. If you have only a DVI port, you will require a rather large adapter. It's not so much an adapter as it is a "power injector" that injects power into the cable whilst converting it from DVI+USB to ADC. This takes the form of what looks like a very large white power brick from a powerbook.

They are unfortunately rather expensive. ($150?) You can get them from Apple, or from Dr Bott.

The other answer is of course to find a graphics artist or developer that does not already have a second display, and sell it to them. Odds are very hight that if you bring the display over and let them "test drive" it for even five minutes they'll buy it immediately.

Re:I love OS X

And if you bitch about having to buy an adapter to drive your Cinema with your new Mac, they may give you a 99 dollar discount right over the phone. They did for me when I bought my Quad.

Dupe several years later?

Check this: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 6/03/130214 [slashdot.org]

Obvious Dupe

The website even has a link to the old slashdot story: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/06/03 /130214.shtml [slashdot.org]

Pointless Effects

If Apple is going to bother optimizing other stuff on the OS, they should at least give you a way to turn off some of the extras when it comes to the GUI.

I don't need high resoution icons, drop shadows, dragging window effects, minimize effects...etc. In windows land, you can turn most of these eyecandy effects off and performance is greatly improved. You'd think that Apple would have considered this when releasing a computer with 256mb of ram on the base model (G4 mac mini). I love the computer, but it is SLOW.

Re:Pointless Effects

I don't need high resoution icons

Those you can turn off. Just set the Finder to use 32x32 pixel icons. icns resources generally contain several versions of an icon, 128x128, 48x48, 32x32, and 16x16 pixels. If you use one of the small versions then the system won't waste time scaling the icon, or memory holding a big bitmap. I doubt you'll see much gain though.

But it's not in Apple's interest to let you turn off too much of the eye-candy. They want Mac OS to have its distinct look, and they are are in the business of trying to sell you newer hardware.

Re:Pointless Effects

Unlike Windows, OS X is composited on the video hardware, and the effort to produce most of those visual effects is done by the GPU, hardware that would otherwise be idle. Turning them off wouldn't give you any speed gains on the CPU, from what I understand.

Re:Pointless Effects

In Windows land, the desktop eye-candy isn't hardware accelerated. Turning off a lot of the OSX eye-candy would only serve to idle the graphics hardware rather than making the computer respond any faster.

Hopefully, Microsoft's Aero will prove this point.

Re:Pointless Effects

those GUI 'extras' are not what is making a 256MB G4 slow. Rather, it would be the fact that the machine is going to be constantly swapping out to disk. Get more RAM.

Re:Pointless Effects

Not knowing much about you, the only thing that comes to mind is to stop externalizing blame. I don't have much to go on here, though.

I'm not a SO guru, but...

what about Linux? Could it obtain benefits implementing some of the improvements made into MacOS X? I've heard about BeOS and the incredible perfomance due to multithreading, it's very dificult to adapt an BeOS kernel to the Linux features (multiuser, drivers...) maintaining the perfomance?

Panther to Tiger?

I updated from Panther(10.3) to Tiger(10.4) and my machine seemed slower. I decided to do a fresh install, and things improved, as always the fresh install is better than an update.

I still think that Panther was running a bit faster tahn Tiger, maybe it is the widgets..........
silly widgets!

This was all done on a PowerBook G4(TiBook).

Re:Panther to Tiger?

It's not just you, I've heard many reports of Tiger being slower on older machines. Because of that, I'm staying with 10.3 on my Pismo until it is replaced as it runs acceptably fast in nearly every situation (I don't do video or gaming or any other CPU/GPU intensive stuff). I don't miss Widgets or any of the other new eye-candy type stuff in 10.4. BTW, the replacement for Pismo will be in the form of the second-gen Macbook Pro with a Merom-based core duo being released in Q3 (fingers X'ed), and will hopefully last 6 years like my Pismo has.

Re:Panther to Tiger?

I have two slower Macs, A G3 500 MHz iBook running 10.4.5 and a Blue and White G3 400 MHz running 10.3.9. The iBook is a bit faster for everyday tasks and that hasnt always been the case (the tower has a faster bus, faster graphics card, faster disk etc...). One thing you MUST do on older macs running Tiger OR Panther is upgade your RAM to a reasonable level, which usually means maxing it out. Even then I had to turn off dashboard on the iBook (I dont really use it on any of my macs anyway).

Both machines are still great for general desktop work and light development. I bumped the iBook to Tiger (OSX) to get Tiger (Java), and I havent really bothered to upgrade the tower because I havent had the time and its not a pressing concern for me. But given the results on the iBook, I dont expect a performance hit when I do upgrade.

Re:Panther to Tiger?

I still think that Panther was running a bit faster tahn Tiger, maybe it is the widgets..........
silly widgets!

No, it's spotlight. My iBook would thrash like crazy until I disabled spotlight. Of course now I can't search at all.

Apple should've made spotlight optional.

Re:Panther to Tiger?

Get EasyFind from http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freewar e/applications.php [devon-technologies.com]. It works without Spotlight.

Ten things they should fix

somebody made a list about ten things that don't work as well as they should (and as a mac admin I agree) : Ten More Things I Hate About Mac OS X [informit.com]

rest of my reply

since I screwed up, here's the rest:

I'm not sure I agree with all or even most of his points of contention.

In issue 1 for example he complains that each open/save dialouge starts out the exact same way and then goes on to complain further in the article that the OS isn't always consistant. It's consistant for each dialouge to remain the same size by default until the user specifies a change. Furthermore since the size of the dialouge can be set per application, that size would need to be specified by the application making having a universal override obnoxious.

In his 2nd point he's descirbes a senario which is at best extremely uncommon and then describes a process which is obnoxious and complicated when it's easier for most people to either have an automator script to open specific things they want or even better for his senario and automator script which asks where he is and then opens the appropriate applications. A simple applescript for the applications one doesn't need all the time with a prompt at the begining to ask whether to launch the remaining apps and then placing that script in the login items folder seems more useful and less annoying than check boxes to enable and disable each item that you must do before loging out the previous time.

point 3 he's correct on

point 4 he's correct on the disapearing sidebar but on the issue of double clicking the boarder, it's a rather difficult task to accomplish accidently so I am sure anyone doing it would notice the dimple before and after.

point 5 he's moving away from his consistancy argument again. With the column view you set the size of the columns and the number of columns, and if you chose to physicaly change the display you can. What he's suggesting is a display system which dynamicaly changes size to fit the content of the display which while it could be benneficial to some people seems overly complicated and a major violation of the consistancy guideline. It's concieveable to see a situation there where all of a sudden you would go from having 4 collumns displayed to having 2 or 1 because you have one file in the display such as "com.apple.Components2.LocalCache.QuickTimeCompone nts" which now expands their one collumn to occupy most of the window.

point 6 he's correct on

point 7 he's got a point but at the same time, with the addition of the PDF abilities and the fact that faxing IS handled with PDFs it does make sense to put it under the PDF button. In the end I don't find it much more of an abstraction than his recomendation to make it an availible printer.

point 8 I can see a method to the madness in that if the next set of startup items require the server, it's important for you to know that the server is not availible BEFORE those apps launch and fail. There may be a better way, but I don't agree that it's a failing.

in point 9 the views update for the column view I think is a good thing. While it's not 100% consistant, in this case it would be irritating for a directory I'm working with to rename and then immediately move out of my working view until I indicate being done with the directory either by being idle or moving to a new object.

The size information I would assume is an updating routine thats scheduled rather than called.

in point 10 if he cant see a situation where a user might unknowingly or mistakenly change their file extention then he needs to think harder. The checkbox would be nice though but it's also nitpicking at this point. It's a potentialy destructive action, and a user should be reminded to think before they do it. Being able to permanently dismiss such reminders is what gives viruses and other malicious programs a better chance of succeeding.

G3

a while back, when OSX.2 had recently came out, and I was still running on an iMac G3 (with 256mb of RAM), I got OSX. it ran much smoother than OS9 did.

Ironic?

Consider the following a sampling of such optimizations, in no particular order

I'm somewhat concerned that an optimisation geek did not order his data set.

Whats up with the ABI change?

It used to be that OSX had a brain-dead ABI that resulted in not all of the PPC registers being used 'properly', in order to maintain a 68k 'compatability' mode ..

Has this been changed? Are all the registers of the PPC being used properly now? Is the PC register actually being used as a program counter, rather than one of the generic 32-bit registers?

On-the-fly Defragmentation

I know that NetWare (at least as far back as 5.1) used a different method to avoid the need for defragmentation, which basically just allowed the disk to read the sectors based on the physical location on the disk rather than the order they were needed. The thing was, without defrag tools, you couldn't even check to see if fragmentation was a problem. The same problem exists with *nix filesystems right now. Everyone says you don't need to defrag, but there's no easy way for the average admin to verify this.

The HFS plus approach seems like a good idea, but I'm wondering if there is a performance cost, both in CPU cycles and drive wear and tear. It also looks to me like the system could be defragging files that are already contiguous, but I may be wrong. Given that modern journaling filesystems (supposedly) are not likely to become fragmented in the first place, is this feature worth it?

I've always loved this about Apple....

While Windows gradually slows down with Service Packs, and completely grinds to a hault on all but fairly new systems with new versions, OS X actually manages to speed up due to developer optomization. Good strategy...

journalling...

Journalling makes files accesses slower. The only time it speeds anything is in the error case of unsafe reboots (crashes). And I get those so rarely, I'm sure that I come out way behind on performance due to journalling.

What is a defragmentation? ;-)

Hi, I use mac stuff since may 2005, I sold my boring/noisy/energy hungry/ugly... 2.4Gh P4 for a mac mini witch I sold last month for a core duo iMac. Sine then, I never had to defrag my disk or do anything else that Windows still needs not to sink. Since Windows can now run, with some work on your part, on a mac, why not then consider buying a mac instead of a regular Windows machine? After all, VISTA will probably not ship until 2007 or later. To this date, VISTA has been announced for 2003, 2005, 2006 and now 2007!!! ans OSX is there NOW "Happy macking !"

one big thing they may have missed....

Doesn't Apple use gcc?

I know gcc itself improved a very great deal over the same time period, and I have always assumed that the speed gains were (largely? mostly?) due to that, rather than wondrous new algorithms on Apple's part.

Linux and KDE sped up a lot too, over the same timeframe.

Apple and GCC

Apple has been contibuting to GCC [apple.com] too you know. Objective C support, PowerPC optimizations, etc (scroll down to optimizations). Another advantage of OSS. The improvements on their hardware were due to their own efforts, and much more radical than the increases to x86 Linux.

Unfortunately, on the Intel side, Apple is going with the Intel compiler, probably because it's faster than GCC Intel. No OSS. But maybe Apple doesn't need to contribute to that because Intel will keep doing good work.

Undocumented Number 11

QUICKSILVER

Get it
Use it
Good

( P.S. Caps Lock would have been autopilot for COOL, but the lameness filter caught me :( )

"Dave: Is Dead == Everybody"

Helping Developers Create Code Faster,
Helping Developers Create Faster Code

I can think of a few other useful permutations:

Helping Create Code Developers Faster
Helping Create Faster Code Developers
Helping Code Create Developers Faster
Helping Code Create Faster Developers
Helping Faster Developers Create Code
Helping Faster Code Developers Create
Helping Faster Code Create Developers
Developers Helping Code Create Faster
Developers Helping Create Faster Code
Developers Helping Code Create Faster
Developers Helping Faster Code Create
Developers Create Helping Code Faster
Developers Create Faster Helping Code
Create Helping Code Developers Faster
Create Developers Helping Faster Code
Create Code Helping Developers Faster
Create Code Helping Faster Developers
Create Code Faster, Helping Developers
Create Faster, Helping Developers Code
Create Faster Developers, Helping Code
Create Faster Code, Helping Developers
Code Helping Developers Create Faster
Code Helping Create Developers Faster
Code Helping Create Faster Developers
Code Helping Faster Developers Create
Code Developers Helping Create Faster
Code Developers Create Faster Helping
Code-Faster Developers Helping Create
Faster-Helping Developers Create Code
Faster-Helping Code Create Developers
Faster Developers Helping Create Code
Faster Developers Helping Code Create
Faster Developers Create Helping Code
Faster Code Helping Developers Create
Faster Code Helping Create Developers
Faster Code Developers Helping Create

Choose a research topic! Lucrative grants to be won! (Topics involving procreation by/of developers expected to go quickly.)

Does this fix OSX's bad Apache & Database

performance under load? As reported here: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520 [anandtech.com] OSX has to this time had severe performance problems under load for Web applications, does it look like the improvements in this article will help?

Hot File Clustering

Does locating so many files that are accessed so often in one part of the disk cause that section to fail more quickly than if all of the "hot" files were to be left where they were? I'm wondering what this does to the life of mechanical drives.

Where I've found OS X to be slow

Network transfers. We chose Dell 1425s running Fedora instead of XServes running 10.4 largely because our benchmarks found the XServes had a huge network latency. It took us almost ten times longer to emit packets in some cases.

Amusing comment about "sleep"

I found the comment about "instant-on" sleep to be amusing.

Yes, we're fully aware that Apple systems can shut down everything execept the components necessary to refresh the DRAM.

The author of the article, apparently, has never used a PC notebook or desktop. Practically every well-behaved system made in the past 5 years, from the $150 eMachines desktops to my generic Compal notebook, supports the ACPI S3 state, which does exactly what Apple's "sleep" mode.

What's really slick about Windows is that the system can wake from S3 suspend and hibernate itself after a certain period of time. My system is set for 6 hours, which means that I don't have to wait for the system to restore during the day, but if I leave my system overnight or longer, I don't have to worry about suspend draining my battery (approx. 20% per day). I can even have different settings if the system is plugged in.

Lack of hibernate hurts

Lack of hibernation in Mac OS, in my opinion, hurts. For those who don't know, "Hibernation" is the term Microsoft uses for a state in which all of the contents of memory are saved to the hard drive and the system completely shuts down. When the system is booted up, that cache is read from the hard drive (and is almost always much faster than a full-on boot). Considering all the things that could go wrong, it works excedingly well. It's sort of like a better sleep, hence the name.

As to why it's needed: battery life. I can hibernate my Dell, unplug it for a business trip and it's still got the same juice a day or two later when I turn it on. When I do the same with my Powerbook G4, the battery often dies while it's asleep.

I'm hoping it's one of the things they add for 10.5.

Re:Lack of hibernate hurts

I don't know why people try to defend Apple on this particular design decision. There's absolutely no reason why hibernation shouldn't be included in OS X.

It could be that it's because hiberation actually does exist in Mac OS X. It's just not a well known fact. OS X 10.4's "Safe Sleep" (Google cache [72.14.203.104]) saves the active memory to disk when a Mac [laptop] goes to sleep...lest the power get interrupted. If one is so inclined, they can activate it, and even choose to use it by default. I've enabled it on my Mini, and it definitely works.

However, if you're not a Mac user, you may not appreciate how good the normal "Sleep" mode is. Unlike Windows, a Mac which has been put to sleep will resume almost immediately, and be instantly usable. My iBook can stay 'asleep' in my briefcase for ages, with very little battery consumption, and as soon as I open the lid, I am good to go. This impresses me more than words can say.

Journaling?

...Journaling in HFS Plus...

That's odd, I assumed Journaling gave a slight performance hit... unless you kernel panic etc. and your recovery has it's ass covered.

And then there's the fact that I just today figured out how to prevent chronic fatal drive thrashing cycles on my sidekick iMac G3 (running Tiger): format the drive HFS non-journaled.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

You don't get out much, do you? GNOME 2.14 is supposed to be extremely fast in comparison to previous releases, which were also faster than their predecessors.

Uhhh...I'm guessing if anyone's not getting out much....well, nevermind. If you can't say something nice don't say it at all.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

Gnome is maybe not the best example. I'd rather talk about lightweight window managers like blackbox fluxbox and openbox. I tried using Gnome 2.10 on FreeBSD 6.0 on a 133 MHz Pentium I laptop, it's as slow as a zombie turtle, as blackbox runs fast.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

You don't have to be a "GNU/Hippie" to use Linux, and there are plenty of reasons to do so, as well, not the least of which is that it's free and it'll run on that old P166 you bought over a decade ago. The "GNU/Hippies" you speak of are largely the guys who spend all day tweaking this and that to make sure the next release of your operating system is secure, productive, and pleasing to the eye, which you might notice Linux is becoming more and more, especially with user-oriented flavours like Ubuntu. The main difference is, the guys at Apple get paid for what they do, and the guys who contribute to Gnome do not. As such, Apple is a little further ahead, especially since their UI is more closely integrated into the core of the OS than Linux' is (and they don't have to contend with different flavours of hardware). Anyway, in closing, flamebait.

Re:Call me weird, but...

VMS is not even remotely related to Unix. See History of Unix [wikipedia.org] and VMS [wikipedia.org] wikipedia articles.

Re:Call me weird, but...

Even MS is originally based on VMS, so in fact, everything is based on some form of *nix.

Um... VMS is definitely NOT "some form of *nix".

Re:Call me weird, but...

OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. It had its problems, sure, but at the time it was the only mainstream OS that was not built on technology besides itself.

It was also the only mainstream OS that could not handle filenames more than 31 letters long, the only mainstream OS that didn't have protected memory, and the only mainstream OS that didn't have any form of preemptive multitasking.

The first of these is the most ironic. Back in 1999, Mac users were still ridiculing "Micros~1", while in fact it was their operating system, not Microsoft's, which could not handle adequately long filenames!

But it was the second and third, the lack of basic features essential for the stability of modern desktop applications, which led to it being such an unreliable system. No surprise that Apple were so keen to ditch the whole crufty thing in favour of the modern platform that became OS X. OS 9 was totally failing to salvage their rapidly declining reputation. OS X was their salvation.

So, yes, OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. But so did its unfortunate users... loudly and regularly.

Re:Call me weird, but...

Anyone who spent any time trying to debug extension conflicts did not shed a tear for OS 9.

OS 9 seemed faster because the first iteration of OS X, which people tended to run on the same hardware, was dog slow.

Re:Call me weird, but...

"Even MS is originally based on VMS, so in fact, everything is based on some form of *nix."

For the short of memory...

There were a LOT of operating systems before *nix. One of the main creaters of OSses was Digital Equipment Corporation. They had an OS for each of their different computer systems (PDP-1 through PDP-20, also known as DECsystem-20). All these OSses had a different architecture, because they wer built for different purposes. However, DEC standardised the CLI on these OSses. The CLI was called DCL (Digital Command Language).

ATT (Bell Labs) were using DEC systems with when they decided to create their own OS. IIRC they used a PDP-7, and later PDP-11's running RSX-11. So, instead of everything being based on *nix, it's the other way around. All the *nixes are "inspired" by the other OSses at the time, in particular RSX-11 and DCL.

VMS (later OpenVMS) was the world's first commercial computer using a virtual memory system. That's why it's called VMS. It was meant as a successor to RSX-11, and it ran on VAX computers (Virtual Address eXtention). The chief VMS architect Dave Cutler was hired by Microsoft to help create Windows NT. Windows NT later became W2K, WXP etc.

So, also Windows is NOT based on *nix.

As far as I can tell, actually only Linux is based on *nix.
Anybody know any other OS that is based on or inspired by Unix?

Re:Call me weird, but...

Mafia saying: behind every great fortune lays a small crime.

Re:What about OSes with GNOME?

KDE, too.

Actually this is a general feature of most software. Just not Microsoft's software.

Most software gets _faster_ in between versions. New features may run slower, but other aspects of the software should speed up, not slow down. Optimization takes time.

People are just used to Microsoft, where (version ++1) = (hardware ++1)

Well, duh!

Quoth the parent:

For all the talk about the speed of OS X, Apple has never addressed the most obvious issue: on a machine that can run either OS 9 or OS X, OS 9 is very much faster.

OS9 did a lot less than OSX, which is why it was faster. OSX is a *lot* more reliable. Examples:

• OS9 didn't have pre-emptive multitasking, so one bug somewhere in one program could bring the system to its knees. I saw that happen far too many times...
  
• OS9 didn't have memory protection, so if a pointer went outside the current app's address space, it could quite happily scribble random data all over another application.
  
• ... I could go on...
  

Before OSX, the mac had the reputation of the machine that crashed all the time. By comparison, Windows was actually pretty reliable (this was before all the spyware/malware/crap that affects it recently, remember). Linux was best, of course...

They took an OS written from the ground up in the early 80s to be graphical, and replaced it with an OS written the 70s to be textual, with the GUI glued on top of it

Now you're just displaying your ignorance

• The mac UI isn't the same as most unix ones - it's not X.
• Even if it were X, for "glued on top", you really need to use "seamlessly integrated". The 'everything is a file' mantra of unix design actually works really well for X.
• The core of the OS is a micro-kernel message-passing system (mach), which was developed between 1985 and 1994 [wikipedia.org]
• ... etc....

And then even worse, the people who wrote Carbon, the MacOS backward-compatibility layer, had no idea how to write it to be fast - simple calls like HLock which used to be two instructions on the original 128K Mac are now thousands of cycles under OS X

newsflash:when you need to do more work because you're in a far-more-capable and complex environment, it can take more machine-instructions to perform the task. This is just griping - the world has moved on from buggy, insecure, crappy-old OS9. Move with it.

They didn't throw any babies away, they did what they needed to do (ditch the abortion that was OS9) and move onto a new platform which provided the security, flexibility, and reliability that any modern OS provides. A brave decision, under the circumstances, and one well-conceived and executed.

Simon

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

Well, the original Amiga OS is considerably faster than Mac OS 9, the problem is there is no task isolation, memory protection, or security to speak of.

The classic Mac OS is even worse off, because the system API was not designed for a pre-emptively multitasking environment, let alone kernel / user mode separation. Too much application level access to systems globals at fixed addresses in particular.

In any case, whatever the problem is, it cannot be blamed on on adapting to "textual" OS. Adapting an insufficiently forward looking design to the modern world is more like it.

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

"But they threw out the baby with the bathwater when they ditched MacOS."

As long as you're waxing rhapsodic about that OS "written from the ground up in the early 80s to be graphical", you might also remember that it was also written from the ground up to be B&W, single-threaded, single-tasking, use fixed-size memory spaces, and totally without any form of internal or user-based security.

Any of those things that were added on later were major hacks to the system. Some, like the non-preemptive MultiFinder (switcher) were ingenious hacks, but hacks nontheless. Or are you saying a modern OS should swap out hundreds of shared low-level global variables on every context switch?

Or that, since you mentioned HLOCK, why a modern OS should have a handle-based non-protected fixed-patition-sized memory system, itself probably responsible for half the memory allocation/corruption bugs and crashes in any given Mac application. Or why a program needs me to allocate more memory to it when there's a half-gig free?

Or perhaps you can explain just why the system resource and process-slicing allocation kernal of a modern OS needs to be "graphical" from the ground up? Or conversely, why graphics, networking, file management, and other subsystems should not be layered on top of a rock-solid base?

I mean, if you really take the time to actually think about it, you might find that the "good old days" are in fact nothing but a fond, hazy memory... and far removed from the truth.

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

for good reason they ditched baby. If by faster, the system would crash if you farted into the wind, yes it was faster. C

certainly not more stable, and thus more productive.

If find not rebooting 3 times a day makes me faster at everything.

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

My machine can run both OS 9 and OS 10.1+. OS 9 is not faster. Why? I have dual processors, which OS9 does not use very well, or I should say, much at all. OS 9 is dog slow compared to 10.2 and up.

Re:Call me weird, but...

Mods: parent is not a troll or flamebait, he's just stating an opinion. That said, he's wrong (IMO), but that's no reason to mod him down. Posts like his are useful in that they further informed and relatively civilized debate.

I much preferred Mac OS back in the OS 9 days. OS 9 screamed in comparison to OS X. It had its problems, sure, but at the time it was the only mainstream OS that was not built on technology besides itself.

If you've ever developed for Mac OS 8/9, you'd realize just how serious those problems were. I wrote part of a printer driver for OS 8/9, and it was hell. Memory allocation was an utter mess. Printer drivers *should* just run in userland, and be unable to muck with the kernel, but that's not how things worked. The driver had full access to both the system memory space and the memory space of whatever application called it. It was preferable to allocate from the application's memory space, but we didn't have that freedom. Because of the stupid user-controlled memory allocation system, we had to worry about how much free memory any application might have been given by the user, and make sure we didn't use more than that. We were trying to modernize the UI and make it more flexible, so we used Metrowerks PowerPlant (an application framework). The problem was this increased our memory requirements to the point where we couldn't fit in the 100kB or so of free memory SimpleText would have by default. To work around this, we would allocate from the system heap. This came with its own problems--if you accidentally wrote to a null pointer, you overwrote the debug traps, and crashed hard. It made for wonderful time in debugging, and forced me to very quickly learn to be careful with pointers and memory allocation (this was my first programming internship, BTW).

Then there was all the cruft left over from the Mac OS's Pascal roots... Pascal strings, pascal calling conventions. And the memory management--Handles!--ugh!

OS 8/9 was a pain in the ass to develop for, whereas OS X is much easier. That's why we're seeing so much great new OS X freeware and shareware.

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

The kernel of Mac OS X was not written in the seventies, and has in fact been in active development since the late 80's (roughly). It's a descendant of Carnegie Mellon's Mach kernel [wikipedia.org], which is well designed and was written from the ground up for SMP and preemptive multitasking - two concepts that OS 9 and it's predecessors were more or less totally ignorant of.

What OS 9 managed successfully (most of the time) was the appearance of speed, as the gui was relatively light weight and the frontmost process got most of the CPU. Try running the webstar webserver on OS 9, and a couple of network shared folders, and then see how fast OS 9 is - my OS X box can handle the same load and still be a usable machine - something that was not possible on OS 9.

Re:20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do

While I can't solve all your problems, here are a few helpful hints:

* SMB can't network share anything but user directory (what about mounted disk images, CD's, single folders?)

I believe you can change this with NetInfo Manager

GUI: Red "close" button has inconsistent behavior: hide (Mail)/close (Safari)/quit app (iPhoto)

The way this is supposed to work is that the Window (Cocoa Document Object) is closed, but the application stays open. Safari and Mail behave properly for me; I agree iPhoto's behavior is annoying.

If "Show Item Info" is selected for the Desktop view, the volume icons only update their free space at restart (or when Finder crashes).

This (as well as the bit about the size of all documents in a directory) has to do with the way faux-unix filesystem behavior is done in OS X; the total size of the contents of a directory cannot be determined except by traversing the directory tree and adding them up, which can take quite a bit of time. Also, getting info from multiple items works as desired for me since at least 10.2, but I know that an earlier version would open several Get Info windows.

Inconsistent installation of applications. Some are dragged to the apps folder, others have an installer. Many things added with an installer have no uninstaller anywhere, so you're stuck with them (how do I cleanly get rid of X11? and XCode? Without using the command prompt?). Also, when removing an application it is difficult to remove its traces (in the Library folder and others).

For the most part, only sucky applications use installers for precisely that reason. Some things like XCode have a legitimate need to put things in various places in /usr or /Library, but if they are well behaved they're easy to get rid of. X11 lives in /usr/X11{R6} and /etc/X11{R6}, while most of the XCode stuff lives in /Developer. The command-line tools (gcc) and the system headers (/usr/include) are harder to get rid of, and you probably shouldn't anyway.

There is no easy way to categorize applications. Everything is bundled up together in the "Applications" folder. You can add subfolders manually, but that makes updating and installing new applications more complicated.

Well, there's the Dock, and there's the distinction between /Applications, ~/Applications, and /Network/Applications, but I suppose those don't really solve your problem. I can't really say I feel for you, though, since I start every Application that doesn't reside in the Dock with open(1) -a, which saves time and brainspace.

Many cross-platform apps such as Firefox, Azureus, aMule have an extremely sluggish GUI, and are far slower than their Windows equivalents. MacMAME runs intensive games at slideshow pace, compared to full framerate on MAME on a Win2K machine. (The Mac has higher system specs than the Windows machines I'm comparing with.)With the exception of Firefox (which sucks on Mac, use OmniWeb or Camino if you don't like Safari) and aMule (which I've never used), these (and NeoOffice/J) are all Java apps, which can't compare with natively compiled code for performance. Well-coded java will run decently on OS X provided you have enough memory, but bloatware like NeoOffice/J are basically hopeless.

StuffIt expander will choke on RAR files containing Hebrew file names. Says "Invalid File Format".

Remember what I said above about sucky apps? Stuffit is one of the worst offenders. My advice is to not use them for anything but .sit files, since there's nothing else that can open them. I use unzip for zips, tar for tar files, and UnRaRX for rars.

Re:20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do

Finder: No right-click > open command prompt here (well, neither does Windows, but easy to add with a Powertoy).

This contextual menu module for the Finder is exactly what you need. I use it all the time.
http://www.pyehouse.com/lynn/termopen.php [pyehouse.com]


Finder: Can't easily know the size of the contents of a directory (without "get info"), or the total size of more than one selected item (even "get info" doesn't help there). Windows Explorer is superior here.

In list view mode, you can see the sizes of all folders by checking the "Calculate all sizes" option in the "View Options", available in the View menu. To see the total size of multiple selected item, hold down the option key (also known as alt) and choose "Show Inspector" from the File menu, or just press option-command-I.


Marking text and then attempting to drag the selected text elsewhere - sometimes works, sometimes doesn't (the drag operation simply selects some more text).

You just need to hold down the mouse button for a brief while (equal to your double-click recognition period, IIRC).


Finder pollutes write-enabled SMB shares it accesses with garbage files like .DS_Store and perhaps others. I don't want these files on my Windows machine!

There are many utilities available that help with this problem, for example TinkerTool.
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html [bresink.de]


StuffIt expander will choke on RAR files containing Hebrew file names. Says "Invalid File Format".

Have you tried using the free command-line utilities available from RAR Lab?
http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm [rarlab.com]

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

I don't think I completely agree with whole unix analogy, a lot of work has been done since the '70's...

It's like saying saying I was "written" when I was born, I wonder how many of my cells are still around since 1958?

Re:Call me weird, but...

Even MS is originally based on VMS

The NT kernel may have been written by one or two people who had been working on OpenVMS. This does not make it "based on VMS".

NeoOffice/J

That you're still calling it NeoOffice/J shows you're using an older version of NeoOffice. They've dropped the "/J" and are just calling it NeoOffice. They recently released NeoOffice 1.2. The major change in it is that is uses JRE 1.4 instead of JRE 1.3. JRE 1.4 uses Cocoa to draw widgets where as 1.3 used or mostly used Carbon. The recent release is slightly faster on startup and quite a bit faster in use as they removed a lot of reliability hacks that were needed when they were using JRE 1.3. Menus and widgets in particular are quite a bit improved.

I think the recent release of NeoOffice will still irritate you but maybe not as badly.

The ultimate fanboy giveaway

Pining for OS 9 is the A #1 best way to spot a hardcore Apple fanboy. Only people who truly fetishize the company and its history miss that OS (or any that preceded it). Those of us who like to get stuff done with our Macs love OS X now.

(Written on an iBook G4 w/10.3, as someone still running a Powermac 6100 with OS 8.6 in my study...but that's because I'm cheap, not because I think it was great.)

The mouse pointer

...in OS X uses a sharper acceleration curve than on Windows. Nudge the mouse, and the pointer moves a couple of pixels. Jerk it the same distance, and it'll fly across a hi-def Cinema display. It can actually move much faster than the Windows pointer.

It's a matter of re-learning your hand-eye-mouse coordination. If the USB Overdrive behavior were the default, millions of graphic artists, and anyone who needs fine control, would cry out in anguish.

Re:Call me weird, but...

DOS evolved from System III? How? DOS lacked multitasking, DOS 1.0 didn't even have nested directories. And Gates did not rip off DOS, he bought it.

Re:20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do

I fully agree with network sharing support. Also, interoperability across the network with Linux boxes is a disaster so far as I'm concerned. (I tried it but found it to be a hit and miss affair as to whether NFS or SMB connections worked properly. Back in 10.3, accessing a SAMBA share would crash the finder some of the time!)

The .DS_Store problem seems to be well known, but since it is not a problem with mac only networks, I imagine that Apple couldn't care less.

I've yet to try the mac mini on an apple only network, but interoperability with other machines such as my linux box is something I've given up on. It's quicker to send files with a USB key and all else I just work around.

I'd like an 'open command line prompt here' as well, and I dislike the inability to add things to the right-click menus.

The lack of Alt-F etc. shortcuts for accessing menus is my major gripe compared to Windows -- this is one thing I do miss.

Finally, the inability to properly uninstall applications seems to me to be a major oversight on the part of Apple. Sticking everything in /Library or the user's ~/Library is at fault here, as is the apparently user-friendly idea of having self contained apps in the /Applications folder. Having more domains (or whatever you want to call them) so that, e.g. Audio apps could go in one domain (Library+Applications folder) and Office apps in another, possibly with things like Adobe's CS suite in its own private application group would make things easier, but I don't know what the best solution to program organisation is, and I'm sure that neither MacOSX nor Windows have got it right so far.

Re:20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do

* An application (for example, MPlayer OSX) can render the sound system completely unusable (to OpenGL/SDL games and applications, but not system sounds) such that not even a reboot helps. Only playing a regular 16-bit, 44.1kHz sound file in MPlayer solves the problem, or editing a setting in the obscure Utilities\Audio MIDI Setup.

That's MPlayer's problem, not OS X's - send the dev team a bug report or check for a newer version. MPlayer should be (preferably) converting the bitrate to the OS's current settings or (at least) changing the settings back to how they were before it launched when it quits.

* My machine never crashes nor is ever powered down without a proper shutdown, and yet I have had several cases of files being corrupted, lost completely or simply set to "Zero KB", for no apparent reason. I have lost photos, audio files and others.

Never seen it here. You might want to check in Disk Utility to be sure the drive is passing its S.M.A.R.T test.

* Network operations are unbelievably slow when talking to the other machines in the house. This is a 100Mbit wired LAN, but the speeds I'm actually getting are more like 10 Mbit/s for data flowing from the Mac to a PC and 200kbit/s in the opposite direction. Affects any kind of network operation (SMB, FTP, etc). I've tried various fixes suggested on various forums, no improvement.

I've heard of this happening to others but don't know what the cause is. I get maximum data transfer from my Macs to both Windows and Linux machines.

I agree with several of your other points and suggest you file bug reports with Apple at http://bugreport.apple.com/ [apple.com] (you'll need to register as a developer, which is free).

Re:20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do

OS X is not perfect, but here's some free technical support:
* You can share CD's by linking them (adding alias) somewhere in your home directory.
* There is software to fight Finder's .DS_Store plague
* You can drag'n'drop directories to Terminal
* Hold Alt when selecting "Get Info" to see info for all files together. Try PathFinder.
* Rotation works for me. Maybe it has to be software emulated for your gfx card?
* How about creating your own applications folder with aliases? If you drag it to dock, you'll get almost Windows Start Menu.
* Before dragging text in Cocoa you need to hold mouse button for 0.5 sec. This is 'configurable' via power toys/terminal.
* Stuffit sucks. Download something else.

Re:20 Things Apple Still Needs To Do

In addition to the other advice given:

> * SMB can't network share anything but user directory (what about mounted disk images, CD's, single folders?)

This is false. You have serveral options beyond the the sharing pane in System Preferences. If you only know how to use Microsoft Windows you can investigate software like Sharepoints, you can use OS X Server which has sharepoint management built into its amazingly great administration tools, or if you are old school Linux user you can just edit your samba.conf by hand, which seems pretty painless to me.

For "command prompt here" I just wrote a tiny Applescript and dropped it in the Finder's tray (something like "tell application "finder" set mypath to (folder of the front window as string); end tell; tell application "terminal" activate; do script "cd " & mypath in front window; end tell;"). Pardon me if I got any of that syntax wrong, I rarely write applescipts :-p

So yeah. Short version: sharepoints or OS X Server will solve your GUI smb/ftp admin needs (easier than cli netinfo or editing confs), and you can use applescripts to customize your interface.

Here, http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 12512 [versiontracker.com] looked it up for you too!

Re:Easiest way to make a Mac faster is go back to

simple calls like HLock which used to be two instructions on the original 128K Mac are now thousands of cycles under OS X

This is highly unlikely. HLock originally only ever set a flag. It now doesn't even need to do that, since a Handle never moves under OS X, but if it did, it still would only need to set a flag. Even allowing the overhead of calling through a shim into Carbon this wouldn't amount to a huge call. There may be other APIs that do exhibit the behaviour you mention, but this was a very bad example to pick.

Microkernel VS Mach

The problem with Microkernels is that Mach has become the model for "what microkernels are".

Microkernels aren't about putting every component into its own memory and execution context.

Microkernels are about having a consistent API for both system and user components to communicate with. Typically you have a message queue, and standardised messages that can be (but not necessarily are) marshalled across address space boundaries.

There's no reason that a processor context switch has to happen, nor even that a message actually needs to be queued and dequeued in another thread, it just has to be possible for that to happen. When you make a call-with-wait (so you're suspended until the return packet gets back), the entire operation can happen in your own execution context.

OR, the operation could involve a round-trip across a network link.

The key is that the API doesn't distinguish between these two cases, it all depends on what's registered to handle that message.

So there's no reason a microkernel OS can't be as fast as a monolithic kernel. In fact microkernels an microkernel-like designs are not exactly rare in the control systems industry, where the performance and latency requirements are much tighter than they are in a desktop OS. The most microkernel-like personal computer OS, AmigaOS, was noted for its high performance and responsiveness.

Mach, no, that was a mistake. But microkernel design isn't the reason why.

Re:Call me weird, but...

"And DOS and CP/M pretty much evolved from Unix system III or so"

CP/M was inspired by DEC TOPS-10 rather than UNIX, and the first version of DOS was very heavily inspired by CP/M.