Lion Developer Preview 1 Vs 2 -- System Performance

[rmbrown09]

Hello,

I was wondering if the second preview of Lion has better CPU and memory management compared to the first iteration.

I have a MBA and so 2gb of Ram and a 1.86 duo get used up pretty quickly if you are doing a lot of stuff...especially in Lion.

SL handles things really well and I almost never use even half of my 2GB even when gaming. However Lion was using over half at idle, and my CPU was getting a workout as well.

I would install and stick with Lion if it were just more efficient. It also gave me far worse battery life the first time around, probably because my system was working harder all the time.

I am at work and can't download and install this right now to check, but I was wondering if and of you noticed performance improvements or...
EVEN BETTER.. had actual benchmarks to show one way or the other.

Thanks

 

[mrapplegate]

Casual usage so far ,I think they have improved a lot as far as memory management since Preview 1.

 

[rmbrown09]

Anyone with an air have preview 2 installed? I am downloading it now. I understand when this is at final release it will run like a dream but right now should i stick with SL or jump to preview 2? I reinstalled SL after preview 1's performance.

 

[altecXP]

Dev1 was great for me, Dev2 is utter hell.

 

[celticpride678]

Dev1 was great for me, Dev2 is utter hell.

Exactly the opposite for me. Most of my bugs were fixed in preview 2.

 

[rmbrown09]

Well I now have developer preview 2 installed and it is working great. My cpu and ram usage is way better than it was before.

Also I am kinda drunk since it;s friday night and I'm on a college campus but Safri keeps auto correcting all my mistypings!!

anyways if you have an air don't be scared it works great in dev preview 2.

this is my CPU usage with only safari open.

 

[WeegieMac]

I'm definitely finding DP2 a far more fluid and bug free experience than DP1.

Far less "beach balls" on DP2 for me, although the animations can be a little sloppy at times, which annoys me. The animation when going back to windowed mode from full screen mode of, say, Safari can result in a stuttering animation of the desktop sliding into place from off screen. In fact, sometimes even entering full screen mode can show some sloppy animations.

My iMac isn't the newest, I openly acknowledge that. However if an 800MHz smartphone can carry off these kind of animations, I expect a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz with 4GB of system RAM to handle them with utter ease.

 

[Dalton63841]

However if an 800MHz smartphone can carry off these kind of animations, I expect a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz with 4GB of system RAM to handle them with utter ease.

This statement might have been valid if it didn't ignore the very different architectures of the CPU's...

 

[cocky jeremy]

I've not really looked in detail, or messed with Dev Preview 2 much yet, but from what i've noticed 2 is much quicker than 1.

 

[Macopotamus]

I have Dev 2 installed and there are some significant RAM leaks in the Finder and with Safari. This is on a MacBook Air with 2GB RAM, so the experience is actually veeeeeeery slow and I'm paging like crazy with just two Safari tabs open.

Dev 1 was much faster for this reason, otherwise Dev 2 feels more refined. Hopefully they fix the memory leaks in Dev 3, otherwise if you have less than 4GB of RAM I wouldn't upgrade to Dev2.

 

[TheAppleDragon]

A lot of bugs fixed, a few new ones arose.

I've got Server turned on, and something weird called "collabd" keeps popping up and killing 300+ MB of RAM. Not much I guess, but a little odd to me. Maybe I just don't know because I haven't used OS X Server before...

Last I checked that's the only memory hog I noticed...

 

[item3785]

I'm definitely finding DP2 a far more fluid and bug free experience than DP1.

Far less "beach balls" on DP2 for me, although the animations can be a little sloppy at times, which annoys me. The animation when going back to windowed mode from full screen mode of, say, Safari can result in a stuttering animation of the desktop sliding into place from off screen. In fact, sometimes even entering full screen mode can show some sloppy animations.

My iMac isn't the newest, I openly acknowledge that. However if an 800MHz smartphone can carry off these kind of animations, I expect a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz with 4GB of system RAM to handle them with utter ease.

I have the same spec iMac as you and I have exactly the same issues with the animations. Not critical, and hopefully the final release will have polished some of these rough edges.

 

[Takuro]

Using a 2010 iMac. DP1 was overall faster than DP2 somehow. Although animations for some things like fullscreen mode apps and mission control are more fluid, other animations are somehow choppier than ever. The dock's magnification as well as general window dragging are annoyingly non-fluid.

I took into account that after upgrading to DP2, spotlight and time machine were re-indexing and some general things had to reinitialize, which could be perceived as an immediate performance hit. However, after running the system for a full day now, it's become annoying. Even shutting down is a bit sluggish. The blue shutdown screen with the circular spinner takes forever to finish.

I'm going to try re-installing, and this time around, I'll attempt to directly install DP2 on a fresh partition instead of over DP1.

P.S. Launchpad has been utter, broken crap since DP1, and remains so. Hopefully we'll see some big improvements in the next couple months.

 

[celticpride678]

Using a 2010 iMac. DP1 was overall faster than DP2 somehow. Although animations for some things like fullscreen mode apps and mission control are more fluid, other animations are somehow choppier than ever. The dock's magnification as well as general window dragging are annoyingly non-fluid.

I took into account that after upgrading to DP2, spotlight and time machine were re-indexing and some general things had to reinitialize, which could be perceived as an immediate performance hit. However, after running the system for a full day now, it's become annoying. Even shutting down is a bit sluggish. The blue shutdown screen with the circular spinner takes forever to finish.

I'm going to try re-installing, and this time around, I'll attempt to directly install DP2 on a fresh partition instead of over DP1.

P.S. Launchpad has been utter, broken crap since DP1, and remains so. Hopefully we'll see some big improvements in the next couple months.

You're going to have to install Snow Leopard on the new partition first. Launch Pad seems to be a work in progress right now.

Personally, the only UI lag that I've seen is in Launch Pad, nothing else.

 

[Takuro]

You're going to have to install Snow Leopard on the new partition first.

Nope. Installing DP2 as we speak on a completely clean, unused partition. DP2 is not just an upgrade. It is a complete installer disc that can be used for both upgrades and clean installs.

People had experienced problems after upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion DP1, so I figured it was possible that upgrading from DP1 to DP2 may have caused issues. I'm starting fresh to eliminate the possibility that some 3rd party software is causing my performance issues. Since DP2 is somewhat newer than DP1, Apple engineers may have made changes to the operating system that further break compatibility with all the software out there that was intended to be used only on Snow Leopard.

 

[Takuro]

Ok. Just installed DP2 fresh. It's running way, way faster. I highly suggest doing a clean installation. I'm also noticing that a lot of bugs that had been carried over from DP1 no longer exist.

I really cannot stress enough how big of a difference I'm experiencing. Lion has gone from unbearably slow and buggy to lightening fast and stable. When I eventually migrate completely from Snow Leopard once Lion goes retail, I'll have to avoid doing a quick upgrade and instead manually reinstall only what I need. It seems it's too easy to accidentally bog down the entire OS if you aren't careful. It's well worth the extra effort though.

 

[stillmatic]

Ok. Just installed DP2 fresh. It's running way, way faster. I highly suggest doing a clean installation. I'm also noticing that a lot of bugs that had been carried over from DP1 no longer exist.

I really cannot stress enough how big of a difference I'm experiencing. Lion has gone from unbearably slow and buggy to lightening fast and stable.

My feelings exactly. I'm loving DP2

 

[richard.mac]

animations are almost as good as in SL for me on my 4870. still a few little stutters in the new animations. i did do a fresh install of DP2 though.

 

[skate71290]

Lion trying to force Gui changes to Applications

Hey, just noticed on CleanMyMac this attached, yes i am watching Two and a Half Men in the background lol, but it is unusual, the default Application progress bars are green, but it is like OS Lion is trying to force a GUI change, not sure if this is important for some things, but if it "breaks" the image like this, surely it can't be good for many 3rd party apps?!

 

[Takuro]

Hey, just noticed on CleanMyMac this attached, yes i am watching Two and a Half Men in the background lol, but it is unusual, the default Application progress bars are green, but it is like OS Lion is trying to force a GUI change, not sure if this is important for some things, but if it "breaks" the image like this, surely it can't be good for many 3rd party apps?!

Well, in Snow Leopard there must have been two GUI source files that were used for progress bar backgrounds and for progress bar indicators. To overwrite the default styling of these two GUI elements, the makers of Clean My Mac must have used a method that is broken in Lion due to a different name for the progress indicator element or something. You can't expect stuff to work in Lion because, after all, you're using the developer preview which is intended to help makers of 3rd party software fix their bugs before Lion's retail release.

Which brings up another important point: You may not want to use any 3rd party software like Clean My Mac, Onyx, or anything that can potentially try to clean system resource files like the cache. These are designed for Snow Leopard technically, and as such, they can potentially have undesired results in Lion. Onyx doesn't even let users run the software if it detects a newer operating system version than what it supports, and I'm surprised Clean My Mac doesn't at least give a warning.

 

[Dmac77]

I've found that my system (mid 07 iMac) performs better with DP2 than it did with DP1. My main issues so far is that my magic trackpad keeps reverting to having drag lock enabled the second I close system preferences after turning drag lock off - really annoying. Otherwise everything has been good for me so far (besides expected hiccups with an early build like software compatibility).

-Don

 

[jeanlain]

I don't see much difference with DP 1, except that some transitions are now more fluid.
It's still a memory hog. Of course, there are memory leaks, but even after a cold start, it uses much more memory than Snow Leo.

Responsiveness and fluidity is generally not as good as 10.6 yet. Scrolling in Safari, Mail, Preview... is measurably less smooth. It caps at 20-40 fps (instead of 60 in Snow Leo) while using twice the CPU.
Resizing feels also a bit slower too, but that may be subjective

There's still a noticeable delay before many actions; like browsing versions of a document in textedit, and going fullscreen in some apps.

Quicklook is quite a bit slower on videos. Thumbnail generation is erratic, with the Quick Look sever sitting there doing nothing while some file are waiting for their thumbnails to be generated.
It also seems Quick Look doesn't use the GPU for video scaling, despite using CoreAnimation layer. For instance, preview a movie in coveflow mode then try to resize the coverflow pane... and feel the pain. . Ouch! Similarly, the Finder uses way too much CPU playing a movie in a QuickLook window (compared to QT player), and the bigger the window, the more CPU it uses.
I believe there are issues with Core Animation. Preview a folder in QuickLook and click the full screen button. Notice how the transition is choppy. It should be butter smooth as the icon preview and description are Core Animation layers.

 

[bushido]

is anyone else's safari acting out when u go on pages like www.redmondpie.com? my cpu starts to run on high speed and it doesn't load the page or any pages after unless i "crash" my safari and start it again. might be some stuff on the sites it clashes with?

 

[kftrainer]

is anyone else's safari acting out when u go on pages like www.redmondpie.com? my cpu starts to run on high speed and it doesn't load the page or any pages after unless i "crash" my safari and start it again. might be some stuff on the sites it clashes with?

I did try it and it loaded but rather slowly and after a min and a half , then CPU does increase but decreases immediately - think it might be the advertisements that also load with it. ?

 

[3282868]

is anyone else's safari acting out when u go on pages like www.redmondpie.com? my cpu starts to run on high speed and it doesn't load the page or any pages after unless i "crash" my safari and start it again. might be some stuff on the sites it clashes with?

I've had Safari freeze up a few times. My internet connection was working, but I have to either force quit Safari or logout then back. Maybe a Flash or other third party codec issue?

Overall it's definitely improved. "AirDrop" is finally working. Dev Preview 1 had missing kext's for certain Broadcom 43xx Airport Extreme cards. As I have a new 2010 3.33GHz 6-Core Mac Pro, it definitely wasn't due to an old Airport card as some suggested.

The nightly builds of "Little Snitch" and other app's work, even app's that weren't updated now run. IStat Menu's is running now, actually there isn't one app out of 100+ that doesn't run well.

Launchpad can be removed from the Dock and its improvements such as the iOS-esque "wiggling" icons and stability are good, but still don't see a need for it.

Local snapshots needs serious work as it eats up HDD space like it's going out of style. Apple engineers know this and have stated it is very much a beta feature they are fleshing out.

Some things I would like to have:

- "Time Machine" - improved usage and support for dual displays, would be great having various backup points, for example "local snapshots" on one display and regular "full" backups on the other.

- TRIM support for Sandforce SSD's. Apple is working on it. 10.7 has TRIM support for Apple's Toshiba SSD's and SSD's with Sandforce controllers will be included.

- OpenGL - full 3.1+ implementation

- Blu-Ray! lol