How Stable is it?

[flowrider]

Yes you are correct.... but as this has been an issue since El Cap, it's not a new issue introduced by using the beta software.... so, to answer the original question, no, no issues introduced so far with using the PB of Sierra

The only reason I brought up was you posted:

all my adobe CC apps work flawlessly

And that is not the case IMO!

Lou

 

[CRaSHeR36]

^^^
Yup - and I'm agreeing with you that it is an adobe issue... just not one introduced by Sierra.

 

[KetchupRob]

@KetchupRob did you find that kernel_task sometimes hogged the CPU? https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/23128071

To Ben honest I don't know, it was so slow that I gave up trying to run it via external drive. I have to admit it was a USB drive and was not USB 3

 

[martinocando]

I always see that question asked, and to be honest, I would say that it is as equally stable as any other version released n the past 8 years. I always install the newest beta, at the earliest possible time. I never have stability issues.

I don't use expensive adobe products, so I can not vouch for them, but I know Acrobat works...

I use the full Adobe CC suite, plus Fusion 8, Tableau, Office 365, Screen flow, FCP, etc. Not a single hiccup.

I work in creative, and all my adobe CC apps work flawlessly... no stability issues. I upgraded from El Cap to PB 6 and am now on PB 7.

I also went from El Cap to PB6 and now PB7, and no issues whatsoever.

I installed to an external drive a while back and it was just painfully slow.

I would blame the external drive, and not the OS.

 

[meme1255]

I would blame the external drive, and not the OS.

If even Windows (!!) can run reasonably fast on HDD, there's no excuse for making OS X so unoptimized that it can't run on HDD.

 

[Roller]

If even Windows (!!) can run reasonably fast on HDD, there's no excuse for making OS X so unoptimized that it can't run on HDD.

That's quite a generalization. You mean the type of HDD and the interface (apparently USB 2 in this case) make no difference?

 

[Aeparker]

I don't seem to have any major problems with PB7. I had a minor problem with Adobe Lightroom that worried me a little, because Lightroom is essential to my photo library. I re-installed it and now it works fine. I believe the problem was an Adobe problem. I have heard of other photographers complaining about Adobe's last update.

Other than that, I am happy with PB7. I'm running it on a different partition than my original El Capitan partition. I migrated a Time Machine backup to get all of my current data. No major problems yet! Hopefully it stays that way.

 

[grahamperrin]

I would blame the external drive, and not the OS.

A few minutes ago I ran OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks from an external hard disk drive on USB 2.0.

Then, build 16A304a of Sierra from the same drive: it's much slower, much less responsive. Not as crisp as Mavericks.

YMMV. I don't expect Sierra to be optimised for this use case – it's an unusual test environment – but the difference between the two systems is remarkable.

16A304a is outdated, I'll test a more recent build.

 

[grahamperrin]

Whilst updates were applied to 16A304a, I left the Mac.

I returned a few hours later to find a symptom that has made pre-release Sierra more often useless (for test purposes) than usable:

• hogging of the CPU by kernel_task.

I restarted the Mac.

16A313a: bugged from the outset by the hogging by kernel_task, and I must emphasise: that's in addition to the 'regular' slowness that was described in my previous post. For the umpteenth time I'll perform a safe boot followed by a normal boot, which sometimes (in the past) allowed Sierra to run for a while without the hogging, but I'm not hopeful.

A couple of weeks ago I half-intended to perform a check of the disk. As the Mac, which is used for test purposes only, was occasionally given to testing FreeBSD-based systems, I didn't begin that check. Now I expect the Mac to be free for a few days – that's long enough for a suitably thorough check – so I'll begin in a few hours and hopefully report back here before mid-September.

Postscripts

The MacBookPro8,2 would not allow HDAT2 to work with the external hard disk drive on USB so instead, I'm using an old Ergo notebook to perform the test of the drive. It began on Sunday afternoon and might complete on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Discussion of this problem continues at https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/23325637

 

[grahamperrin]

a USB drive and was not USB 3

Anyone: where USB 2.0 is a constraint, with which of the following would you expect a Mac to perform better?

a) booting and running from a hard disk drive (Seagate GoFlex Desk) on USB 2.0

b) booting and running from a USB flash drive (Kingston DataTraveler G4) on USB 2.0

 

[vista980622]

Anyone: where USB 2.0 is a constraint, with which of the following would you expect a Mac to perform better?

a) booting and running from a hard disk drive (Seagate GoFlex Desk) on USB 2.0

b) booting and running from a USB flash drive (Kingston DataTraveler G4) on USB 2.0

A will perform better.

 

[grahamperrin]

@vista980622 I have the same expectation. Thanks.

The Mac boots quicker and performs far better with ZFS and MATE on the USB flash drive, than with Sierra on the hard disk drive.

MATE may be viewed as relatively lightweight but still, the difference in performance surprises me.

 

[fischersd]

@vista980622 I have the same expectation. Thanks.

The Mac boots quicker and performs far better with ZFS and MATE on the USB flash drive, than with Sierra on the hard disk drive.

MATE may be viewed as relatively lightweight but still, the difference in performance surprises me.

"relatively light weight". You're kidding me right? You're honestly going to compare the performance of a light weight Ubuntu distro to OS X/MacOS? And today on Top Gear, we'll be testing this Volkswagen Golf against this Bugatti Veyron. Night and day.

Here's their hardware requirements....maybe this'll put it in perspective for you:
https://ubuntu-mate.org/about/

 

[grahamperrin]

… Ubuntu … Here's their hardware requirements....maybe this'll put it in perspective for you:
https://ubuntu-mate.org/about/

Wrong perspective. It's not Linux, but I didn't feel the need to go into that level of detail.

 

[dogslobber]

I'm am debating on installing the Mac OS Sierra public beta. All the new features look great. I held off on installing it because I didn't want to deal with bugs. This is the 7th update. How stable is it? I have a early 2015 iMac. I am a photographer, so I need my all of my Adobe software to work. Should I install or should I wait?

At this point we're pretty much ready to see the release of 10.12.0. There won't be any major changes as the public betas cycle completes. The next developer build after that is usually a release candidate that will take a major bug to prevent release on <deleted>.

 

[redheeler]

hogging of the CPU by kernel_task.

I noticed this happening after installing Sierra on my (admittedly unsupported) late 2008 MacBook Air yesterday. That hardware is very underpowered to begin with, so any excess CPU usage becomes immediately noticeable. I did the SMC reset and that seems to have helped a little bit, but hasn't fully resolved the issue.

 

[grahamperrin]

The thorough test of the disk that began on Sunday completed today – around three days for the HDAT2 read/write/read/compare test of a 1 TB disk. No errors.

Now with that error-free disk, there remains a vanishingly small possibility of non-corrupt data that is troublesome, and/or corrupt data. (The 1 GB or so that I copied to a home directory, aiming to test iCloud Drive Desktop and Documents Folders, was copied from a separate HFS Plus volume on the same disk (not from the integrity-checked ZFS home directory that I previously used).)

So (a) I'm back to the earlier observation that pre-release Sierra was relatively slow, relatively less responsive. Plus (b) the numerous occasions when the OS failed to mount a volume, or multiple volumes. Were the two – (a) and (b) – somehow related? I'll never know and (sorry, folks) my cases weren't fed to Apple, so it's fingers crossed for not too many customers to find the same symptoms after Sierra is released.

Plus (c) the hogging of the CPU by kernel_task without me attempting to use the Mac (typically running just Finder, and Activity Monitor), plus (d) the weeks that it took for my ~1 GB test set of data to be copied to iCloud Drive, plus (e) the inconsistent appearance of iCloud-related icons during those weeks, and so on.

Does the sum of those things equal instability?​

Probably not. To me, "an unstable OS" is one in which the kernel panics, or essential applications suffer from undesirable crashes. But I never really had an opportunity to treat the OS as usable, and that's debatably worse.

Good luck folks!

 

[grahamperrin]

https://forums.developer.apple.com/message/174506#174506 2016-08-31 with 16A313a someone described big problems involving kernel_task (in a test environment that's very different from mine).

There's a smile, but I doubt that the developer was "kidding" about the problems. 2015 MacBookPro11,5 with 16 GB memory for an OS that requires 2 GB, the hardware is suitably powerful.

… late 2008 MacBook Air yesterday. That hardware is very underpowered to begin with …

Thanks, I'm glancing at http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/index-macbook-air.html … is it a hard disk drive in yours? How much memory?