Mavericks vs Yosemite Performance Wise

[Jsmalls]

Specs -- horrible
--------------------
Late 2011 - 13" Macbook Pro
4GB RAM
Intel 3000 i5 Processor
--------------------

My Mac has been running annoyingly slow lately, so out of pure rage I decided to do a clean re install of my Hard Drive. However, I am having a hard time trying to decide which OS X would be the best for my computer. Would Yosemite or Mavericks have a superior performance on my machine? I am looking for pure performance, not gaming, mostly programming, iOS and OS X development, and surfing the web. Before the wipe my Mac could barely run two apps at the same time... So, I want to know which OS X would perform the best on my system. Thanks.

 

[leman]

So far, Yosemite seems slightly easier on RAM for me, but that is just my subjective opinion and might very well be wrong. At any rate, Yosemite will not be any slower than Mavericks. The GPU drivers have definitively been improved.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I have the same Mac albeit I upgraded it to 8 MB of ram. I had a dual boot of Mavericks / Yosemite going for a good while, and recently went solely with Yosemite. The Mac performs well. I haven't seen anything that would indicate that my Mac cannot handle running Yosemite under normal use conditions. I have been very happy.

I am looking to upgrade to SSD. I think that that will breathe new life into the Mac, as the boot time and file write speed is very slow on the stock HD, at least for my liking it is.

 

[5aga]

PB 3 has been much better than Mavericks in both stability and and performance.

will most likely be the first time I install any .0 version of OS X.

as others have said an SSD will make a world of difference. I

Mavericks and onward should require an SSD - I can't quite figure it out but I swear Mavericks certainly seems to "prefer" it.

 

[iBug2]

Yosemite's Finder redraw is much slower than Mavericks. When you resize windows the FPS is certainly not capped at 60, even with the most powerful Macs out there right now. I don't know what's up with Apple and GPU acceleration. They fixed this with Tiger and made Finder redraw really smooth but later on it became more and more choppier with every release.

 

[matthewadams]

Using it on a Early 2011 13" with just 4GB RAM and its super smooth.
But thats mainly because of the SSD,.. I imagine running anything beyond ML (or even SL) on a HDD a huge pain in the ass. There's so many daemons running in the background (partly thanks to the whole iCloud business) that occasionally need read/write access to the disk, it really slows the whole system down.

 

[gamesetmatch]

I haven't noticed any noticeable speed difference between Mavericks and Yosemite.

I still believe Mountain Lion was the speedier.

I would only wish to know which terminal commands to run to remove all the animation and candy effects on OS X 10.10. These effects make a diference, performance and speed-wise.

Regards,

-Mark.

 

[benji888]

Those specs are not horrible, I'm using the Yosemite beta on my mid-2010 MacBook Pro 13 (4GB/core2duo2.4). But, months ago, b4 yosemite, I installed a DIY Fusion drive, this improved performance more than anything, I highly recommend it, and going with OWC SSD & data doubler kit (they have quality products, and the best service online, which is also local in US, not outsourced).

Yosemite is still in beta, so any performance reviews will be subjective. Also, with betas Apple does some extra diagnostics in the background, then when you use the feedback, it sends these with the feedback, so, any testing would not be accurate until the GM. Yosemite should be ready sometime in October, so you can always put Mavericks on and update later. That being said, I have found Yosemite to be overall a bit faster, but, not ready for consumption, as I have experienced some safari plug-ins and apps crashing, also, some apps not ready for it yet, so, you'd need to check your apps for compatibility (which you can do elsewhere on this forum).

 

[Wayfarer]

Running the latest version of Yosemite of my 2013 RMPB. Runs as smooth as butter. Haven't noticed any glaring bugs.
I'm tempted to use it as my main OS. Can't wait for the release next month!

 

[76ShovelHead]

Specs -- horrible
--------------------
Late 2011 - 13" Macbook Pro
4GB RAM
Intel 3000 i5 Processor
--------------------

My Mac has been running annoyingly slow lately, so out of pure rage I decided to do a clean re install of my Hard Drive. However, I am having a hard time trying to decide which OS X would be the best for my computer. Would Yosemite or Mavericks have a superior performance on my machine? I am looking for pure performance, not gaming, mostly programming, iOS and OS X development, and surfing the web. Before the wipe my Mac could barely run two apps at the same time... So, I want to know which OS X would perform the best on my system. Thanks.

Was just about to start a thread on this, no kidding!

My computer is running Mavericks on an SSD (128GB), and I didn't want to mess with it so I proceeded to try out my copy of the public beta on a really old USB 2.0 external drive... I'm happy to report that apps on this dinosaur of a drive load near instantly running Yosemite. I'm talking even the latest iWork.

Yosemite is beyond snappy... I kinda can't wait to get this working on my other machine!

 

[meson]

There's nothing at all wrong with that machine. My Mid 2012 13" in it's stock configuration 2.5GHz i5, 4GB ram and HDD with Mavericks/early Yosemite Betas felt much like my old Early 2008 MacBook did on Lion. The issue is that OS X likes to cache everything it can, and there is so much reading and writing to the HDD that goes on that slows everything else down, and with with ~200 processes running at idle in Mavericks or Yosemite vs. ~35 in Snow Leopard, the system uses more resources.

Trying to do things like running a virtual machine or any resource intensive software, and any machine in the last 6 years or so with an HDD feels like a slug.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and I added some ram and put in an SSD. The only time the ram is needed is when I want to run a virtual machine, otherwise, I'd be perfectly content with 4GB. The SSD is the real difference maker. It makes app launching near instantaneous, the machine boots in seconds, and can run a virtual machine without grinding to a halt.

I'm now beginning to loosen up my old habits of keeping the running apps to a minimum. Multitasking is now effortless. Based on your usage, swapping your HDD for an SSD will make your machine feel better than new, and will be the difference maker.

Mavericks and the early Yosemite Betas performed roughly equally, though the most recent beta feels quite stable and snappy, and won't slow your machine down any more than Mavericks. With Yosemite on your system, it might be worth turning off the transparency in the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, if you notice any issues in the GUI. However, I wouldn't expect the iGPU to be an issue on that recent of a machine.

 

[Populus]

My mid 2010 13" MBP (MBP 7,1) shows poor performance, even with the latest beta (PB3) of Yosemite. Animations of Mission Control are very choppy, even with an SSD (the SSD only improves read-write on the disk, boot time, copying files... but the animations rely on the now old nVidia m320).

People with an integrated Intel HD Graphics, like yours (Intel HD 3000) are seeing a good graphic performance, probably due to the amount of VRAM.

I'll be keeping on Mavericks for a long long time... The bad thing is I already upgraded to iCloud Drive

 

[xmichaelp]

Get an SSD.

 

[CptSky]

Yosemite is slower on my Macbook Pro (Late 2009). Although I think Yosemite is doing a better usage of my 8 GB of RAM, animations are lagging, CPU usage is high when using Safari... Mavericks was better in term of performance.

 

[fisherking]

my hard drive died last week, so...new drive. figured i'd install the beta...and am very happy.

my 2011 macbook pro is running beautifully. a few bugs, but nothing significant. and it's fast, stable. feels good. looks great. and EVERYTHING works.

i would NOT go back to mavericks, which was good for me.
yosemite is AWESOME...

 

[poiihy]

Mid-2009 15-inch macbook pro with 4GB RAM

Yosemite runs perfectly fine.

 

[PsykX]

Mid-2009 15-inch macbook pro with 4GB RAM

Yosemite runs perfectly fine.

I had that but a 13-inch. It has been running terribly slow. I was reluctant about investing in this machine because I didn't use it very often - but then realized its slowness made me use it even less often.

So I invested $150 + $100.
My first purchase was a 256GB SSD, and it brought the game to a whole new level. This is what made the biggest difference, by far.
My second purchase was 8GB of RAM so I can switch between more memory-intensive apps (i.e. Xcode)

 

[poiihy]

I had that but a 13-inch. It has been running terribly slow. I was reluctant about investing in this machine because I didn't use it very often - but then realized its slowness made me use it even less often.

So I invested $150 + $100.
My first purchase was a 256GB SSD, and it brought the game to a whole new level. This is what made the biggest difference, by far.
My second purchase was 8GB of RAM so I can switch between more memory-intensive apps (i.e. Xcode)

You probably had a failing hard drive

 

[PsykX]

You probably had a failing hard drive

That's what a few people on this forums have told me.
I've heard no clicking noise and I can't say I've used it all that much either.

 

[TheBSDGuy]

Although I'm not a big fan of Yosemite, it's still in beta test and the code in it is likewise "not official." Typically developers put trace code into libraries used by apps to trace errors, especially in code that's new or they suspect may be problematic. That will cause some slowdowns and excessive memory and CPU use when they get used. Also, their reporting application typically kicks on once in a while and records a profile of the system etc. and that can be time consuming too.

About your drive, I was under the impression it was an SSD. If it's an SSD with a problem it won't click because there's nothing mechanical in it to click. An SSD with a bad block will usually get to the bad block, freeze for a while, then return an error saying it can't access the file. If you wanted to test it I'd recommend Scannerz but it, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't been Yosemite certified yet. I'm not even sure if its possible to "certify" any kind of app on a beta release of the OS.

Assuming you're using an SSD, then what you may want to do is contact the vendor and see if there are any oddities they're seeing with it and Yosemite. You may need to tweak some stuff or install drivers.

My guess would be that you're hitting libraries with lots of trace/debug code in them that's slowing stuff up, or the systems collecting information. When I first used Yosemite the system did it's collection routine for what seemed to be a few hours then stopped and now just does periodic updates.

 

[Merackon]

My performance has been rather horrendous with an Early 2011 15" MBP, with a June 2014 installed 250GB 840 EVO, RAM is the same though, perhaps that is a worthy upgrade?

 

[sw6lee]

Yosemite is slower on my Macbook Pro (Late 2009). Although I think Yosemite is doing a better usage of my 8 GB of RAM, animations are lagging, CPU usage is high when using Safari... Mavericks was better in term of performance.

I agree with you. I have 2013 MBA with SSD and 4GB RAM. Everything's smooth for a few hours after you boot up in Yosemite (I don't mean first boot up, just regular boot up). However, after a few hours, the animations become extremely choppy and I think the cause might be safari. Sometimes Evernote seems to cause it though. And when it gets choppy, even though you quit everything, the choppiness still remains even if you have a lot of free ram. The only way to fix it is to reboot.

Yesterday, I did not open safari or Evernote. I only used opera for browser, and opened a lot of other apps like mail, preview, wunderlist, Office, etc and the animation stayed smooth until today.

I can't believe Apple has released GM, and it still has the bug like that I mentioned in first paragraph. I really want to use safari, but I cant. I hate choppy animations so much.

 

[fisherking]

my geekbench score is slightly higher in yosemite beta (over 10.9.4). seems about the same, but am definitely hearing my fans less now...

EDIT: 5270 vs 5235, so not much different. but certainly not slower here...