Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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.clue

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Friday, April 19, 2002
09:47 - Macs are Slow as Hell http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,51926,00.html	(top)
Ah, this is refreshing. It's time for a good ol' "Why are Macs so slow?" article in a major tech magazine. It's been a long time since I saw one of these-- and one with this kind of candor is actually rather refreshing. But I'm glad that it takes a real problem-solving approach to the issue and realizes that it's only certain things that are slow-- not just some woeful lack in the fundamentals of the hardware. What Wired is discussing here does not refute things like three-digit Quake frame rates or the G4's trouncing of top-end P4s in RC5 tests. The slowness is all in the UI layer-- it's all OS X's fault. Granted, 10.1 is a huge improvement over 10.0.x in this regard-- it makes it usable rather than painful. But it's still not zippy or done-before-you-blink like Windows is. That's right-- I use Windows machines at work every day, and everything I do on them-- opening a web browser, loading a page, bringing up the system clock, switching apps, opening accessories like Paint-- it's done before I've taken my finger off the mouse button. And this is on two-year-old 400MHz Franken-boxes, let alone brand-new P4-based workstations. Kris constantly reassures me, when I raise these complaints, that the issue is exactly as Wired concludes: Mac OS X is very, very young. Their priorities are getting it out into the mainstream, making it compatible with hardware and building an application base, and making it just fast enough for it to be usable. And it is. This is because the entire OS is written in object-oriented code-- C++, Objective-C, Java. OO is easy to maintain and allows for quick and efficient development of code, but it's slow. Procedural languages like C are faster, and as the code for the various parts of the OS stabilizes and matures, the engineers rewrite parts of it in C for the speed boost. And C, in turn, is really fast to write and slow to execute compared to assembly language-- so when the C code stabilizes, they optimize things further by rewriting critical parts of it in assembly. This takes time. Lots of time. And the perceived speed improvements in Windows over the years have been as much due to these kinds of optimizations, occurring over the course of the last ten years, as to advancing hardware. IE has become a native kernel process, as one "minor" example-- the reason why IE launches instantly, while Netscape takes a few seconds to launch on Windows. So OS X has a long way to go down this road, and I'm rather impressed that they were able to get such a candid confirmation of exactly that from an Apple spokeswoman. The culprit, it turns out, isn't the new iMac's hardware, but its operating system, which Apple focused on getting to market first and bringing up to speed later. In order to let OS X support as many existing software applications as possible, "Apple supported a number of legacy technologies designed to ease their transition to the new operating system," said Nathalie Welch, the company's public relations manager for hardware. As a result, Welch said, "We are merely at the beginning of the performance opportunities in Mac OS X." You can bet that performance is still very high on the list of priorities. The 10.1.4 release which just appeared speeds up indexed filesystem searches by many hundreds of percent-- it would seem that a lot of OO code has been optimized in there. And they're not done yet. Not by a long shot. It'll be a few years yet before OS X grows up. But when it does, just stay out of its way...