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What are real benefits of ML over SL?

L

Luis Ortega

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 10, 2007
1,193
372
I have a 2008 2 x 2.8ghz mac pro with 16 gb ram, a gtx 285, 4 hdd including a boot ssd and a bluray burner.
I do mostly FCP (not X) and Photoshop editing, along with the usual lighter computer stuff like internet, emails, etc.
I run OSX SL 10.6.8 and everything works well.
I have avoided going to L or ML because they seem to be obsessed with ios gimmickry rather than useful performance enhancements like better memory use, better multi-core use, etc.
I have no need for the ios gimmicks in ML, but I have noticed that some apps require the use of L or ML rather than SL.

My question is, are there any real benefits in terms of computer performance and the use of resources that ML has over SL or is it all about added ios gimmicks?
And would going from SL to ML create any compatibility issues with my current software and hardware?
Thanks for any advice.
 
I use Premiere Pro so it's a no-brainer to upgrade to Mountain Lion with native support for cheap PC GTX570 graphics cards that have 2x CUDA & 3x OpenCL performance of my old GTX285. It depends what you are doing in Photoshop but it does take advantage of OpenCL.
 
Just a tip, if you have an external lying around install ML on it and see whether you like it or not and if there are any 3rd party software issues.
I jumped from Leopard on an old Powerbook to ML, 10.8.2 sucked big time, I updated and it seems to be a bit better, yes, I agree, lots of unnecessary gimmicks which slow down the OS, eat resources and slow shutdowns due to services not shutting down, hell, my old PB startup and shuts down faster, also, I got a free 8 GB RAM upgrade and 2 GB is already lost on the OS, just after startup I already loose about 2.2 GB but with a few startup items.
Spaces was much better in Leopard and SL, mission control just plain sucks IMO.

Best way is to find out yourself, nobody can really say wether you like it or not.
 
justperry said:
Just a tip, if you have an external lying around install ML on it and see whether you like it or not and if there are any 3rd party software issues.
I jumped from Leopard on an old Powerbook to ML, 10.8.2 sucked big time, I updated and it seems to be a bit better, yes, I agree, lots of unnecessary gimmicks which slow down the OS, eat resources and slow shutdowns due to services not shutting down, hell, my old PB startup and shuts down faster, also, I got a free 8 GB RAM upgrade and 2 GB is already lost on the OS, just after startup I already loose about 2.2 GB but with a few startup items.
Spaces was much better in Leopard and SL, mission control just plain sucks IMO.

Best way is to find out yourself, nobody can really say wether you like it or not.
Click to expand...

This was what I did like you suggested above. I have 2 HDs one with SL and the other with ML for testing out any software compatibility issues.
 
Probably the biggest GUI difference is indeed better memory management and vastly improve paging systems.

Of course you can (and probably already have) read the app and user environment changes and additions here:


But the meat of most of the changes can be seen - at least as a starting point to understand - here:
But there's lots of other stuff too. You can find articles like this one: http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/04/mac-osx-lion-corestorage-volume-manager/ all over the internet about very many aspects of Lion and ML.

In all, Lion has a lot faster and smoother GUI than SL. And ML is a slight bump up yet again over Lion. Both offer many new enabling technologies, frameworks, enhancements, and security plugs over SL.

If you don't like the full frame app direction Apple is moving in then you can configure them out. If you don't like the iOS-like features you can turn them off. True in all cases I know of. Those are only ornamental enhancements which serve to or are supposed to serve to, enhance the user's experience and workflow. Most of them work nicely. There's always some old-timer fuddy-duddy users who complain and resist change which IMHO are to be tolerated but not taken seriously. :) Most of them would be having us all still using a DOS prompt if we gave them their way. :p
 
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Tesselator said:
Probably the biggest GUI difference is indeed better memory management and vastly improve paging systems.

Of course you can (and probably already have) read the app and user environment changes and additions here:


But the meat of most of the changes can be seen - at least as a starting point to understand - here:
But there's lots of other stuff too. You can find articles like this one: http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/04/mac-osx-lion-corestorage-volume-manager/ all over the internet about very many aspects of Lion and ML.

In all, Lion has a lot faster and smoother GUI than SL. And ML is a slight bump up yet again over Lion. Both offer many new enabling technologies, frameworks, enhancements, and security plugs over SL.

If you don't like the full frame app direction Apple is moving in then you can configure them out. If you don't like the iOS-like features you can turn them off. True in all cases I know of. Those are only ornamental enhancements which serve to or are supposed to serve to, enhance the user's experience and workflow. Most of them work nicely. There's always some old-timer fuddy-duddy users who complain and resist change which IMHO are to be tolerated but not taken seriously. :) Most of them would be having us all still using a DOS prompt if we gave them their way. :p
Click to expand...

Thanks for all your advice and links.
I was under the impression that even if I hide or turn off the new features, they are still using resources and slowing things down.
 
Tesselator said:
... There's always some old-timer fuddy-duddy users who complain and resist change which IMHO are to be tolerated but not taken seriously. :) Most of them would be having us all still using a DOS prompt if we gave them their way. :p
Click to expand...

C:_ Tesselator, count me in that category. I want my system's resources to be used only for the tasks that I choose and nothing more. Then, I can truly enjoy the difference between an 8086 computer and a Sandy or Ivy Bridge one.
 
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Luis Ortega said:
Thanks for all your advice and links.
I was under the impression that even if I hide or turn off the new features, they are still using resources and slowing things down.
Click to expand...
Not all that many. Mountain Lion is just as fast on my desktop as Snow Leopard ever was–and I do use the iOS-inspired features.
 
Tutor said:
C:_ Tesselator, count me in that category. I want my system's resources to be used only for the tasks that I choose and nothing more. Then, I can truly enjoy the difference between an 8086 computer and a Sandy or Ivy Bridge one.
Click to expand...

Luis Ortega said:
Thanks for all your advice and links.
I was under the impression that even if I hide or turn off the new features, they are still using resources and slowing things down.
Click to expand...

Nope! :) This is a misunderstanding of OS X. Nothing in ML or Lion eats CPU cycles any more than in OS X 10.4, 10.5, or 10.6 and in fact typically configured it's less. Memory footprint is virtually identical to 10.6 (± a few megabytes) and I don't remember what it was in 10.5 or 10.4. I/O is far less in Lion than in 10.6 as the dynamic pager profile and scheduling in SL was insane. Although it's still not perfect in Lion either. ML is a slight improvement in that regard but still needs work IMO.

But I completely understand the misunderstanding. There s a lot of misinformed opinion out there and so much of it is posted with authority. Just the other day I read a thread of supposed "tips" here saying how you could speed up your mac by removing Dashboard widgets. As he explained it they run in the BG and also are loaded into RAM even if not used. Both 100% untrue of course but it was said with authority so I'm sure most people reading it believed it. There were a bunch of other so called "tips" in that list which were also 100% wrong and a few of them even potentially detrimental to the stability of OS X itself.

Anyway, no, Lion and ML use actually less I/O and CPU cycles than 10.6.8 do - this can be profiled using some of the developer tools distributed by Apple and/or member developers.

Attributes and features which do use resources (like for example Window drop-shodows) once turned off seise to tax the system in any way. Off is off in all of the cases I can think of.
 
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I've got boot drives for my Mac Pro with Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard and Windows 8.

I'm really a fan of Snow Leopard. The big Aqua progress bars, colorful icons and lack of iToy influences make it just seem like a real Mac desktop OS. I keep it current with Apple updates and other SL-specific things like Mail and Aperture.

It's one of those "good old days when Apple cared about the Mac Pro and when a MacBook Pro could have its hard drive or battery swapped in a few seconds" thing.

In the real world I use Mountain Lion on my three Macs. The fully re-sizable windows (like Windows!), the deeper shadows behind the active window and the iCloud coordination of Calendar and Contacts make ML the better OS for daily use. On the MBP, or when using Time Machine File Vault 2 is way better than the original File Vault.

Mountain Lion + Mountain Tweaks is an excellent combination.
 
Tesselator said:
There's always some old-timer fuddy-duddy users who complain and resist change which IMHO are to be tolerated but not taken seriously. :) Most of them would be having us all still using a DOS prompt if we gave them their way. :p
Click to expand...

Darn,

First time ever I have to disagree with something from Tesselator. My problem with this post is not that it disparages people of the "if it works, don't fix it"-clan, it also bypasses two of the heaviest reasons why some people will need to stick with snow leopard:
- Rosetta (well publicized)
- changes in SMB - support (see http://webdiary.com/2012/08/31/lion-smb/)

Due to these two lion absolutely ruined a month for me.

I do not discourage trying out ML, but anyone not heeding justperry's advice is looking for trouble.

RGDS,
 
seveej said:
.... My problem with this post is not that it disparages people of the "if it works, don't fix it"-clan, it also bypasses two of the heaviest reasons why some people will need to stick with snow leopard:
- Rosetta (well publicized)
- changes in SMB - support (see http://webdiary.com/2012/08/31/lion-smb/)
Click to expand...

Well that sort of bypasses the "don't fit it" crowd, because not fixing real problems.

It is extremely unlikely there is single, creditable vendor of software that "needs" Rosetta that hasn't told users it is time to move on years ago. Either by updating the product , going comatose as a company , or by disappearing/exiting the business (or perhaps just the product). The users need to keep the old program going often because they have data trapped in its propriatary format. That really isn't "working". The software is dead. That is a problem that needs fixing.

Times change. data sometimes needs to move to new media and new formats.

SMB 1.0 ( and old crackable authentication protocols) are in a very similar boat. There isn't a current NAS vendor who had an initial hiccup with Lion and only offering old deprecated feature set that hasn't moved on. This actually was overtly deprecated by Apple. It was marked as not going to work and folks are trying to classify this as "working, but don't fix". It was on the list of things to be fix.

Apple went there own way for two reasons. One was Samba was taking forever to get to SMB 3.0 support. ( It took Samba 7 years to go from 3.0 to 4.0 ) If it is a choice between keeping up with new deployed Microsoft networks and catering to calcified network deployments, Apple (and anyone else interested in growing) is going to choose the future rather than the shrinking past. The other smaller factor probably was SAMBA going GPL3. Apple is avoiding GPL3 when it can.

For both of these there is a huge difference between "if working , don't fix" and procrastination.
 
deconstruct60 said:
It is extremely unlikely there is single, creditable vendor of software that "needs" Rosetta that hasn't told users it is time to move on years ago. Either by updating the product , going comatose as a company , or by disappearing/exiting the business (or perhaps just the product). The users need to keep the old program going often because they have data trapped in its propriatary format. That really isn't "working". The software is dead. That is a problem that needs fixing.
Click to expand...

Appleworks database users who want to rebuild a new database (in, for example FileMaker) gaining access to Appleworks in Lion or Mountain Lion to export their data (or just continuing to use Appleworks in Mt. Lion).

[click on image to enlarge]
 

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On my MBP 1.83 (one of the original MBP's) I have a triple boot.
10.4.11, 10.6.8 and XP. Since Tiger was a good OS I was a little apprehensive
about SL. Hence the triple boot. Now it's like 10.4 who? :rolleyes:
Check Youtube for adding Rosetta to 10.8 during installation. There are several videos there on that. Knowing Rosetta is there may take out "I don't know about this" move :)

MacPro 2008 3.1 | 14GB Ram | Quadro 4000 | MC6.0 | OS 10.6.8 | MOTU HDX-SDI | ATTO R644| LaCie 324
 
Tesselator said:
There's always some old-timer fuddy-duddy users who complain and resist change which IMHO are to be tolerated but not taken seriously. :) Most of them would be having us all still using a DOS prompt if we gave them their way. :p
Click to expand...

Dos prompt? Ones and zeros! Get off my lawn! :)

Lots of us disparagingly used the term WIMPs on some computers in the 80s: windows, icons, menus, and pulldowns. Not that we hated them because they were knew but because there was not 100% of the resources doing what the user wanted. During my amiga phase one of the things I loved the most was I could quit the gui if I did not need it and give a speed boost to things.



seveej said:
Darn,

First time ever I have to disagree with something from Tesselator. My problem with this post is not that it disparages people of the "if it works, don't fix it"-clan, it also bypasses two of the heaviest reasons why some people will need to stick with snow leopard:
- Rosetta (well publicized)
- changes in SMB - support (see http://webdiary.com/2012/08/31/lion-smb/)

Due to these two lion absolutely ruined a month for me.

I do not discourage trying out ML, but anyone not heeding justperry's advice is looking for trouble.

RGDS,
Click to expand...

I have another one to add to that list. We have 2 macs in our household and they both run snow leopard.

Upgrading mine is not up for debate ... some of the things that are critical to me will not run above 10.6. I did buy the lion installer to test things out in a virtual machine but decided against installing it in my production environment.

The other one my spouse just needs for word and such. So it sounds like it would be easy to go ahead and upgrade that machine? Right? Wrong. Guess who would then be doing tech support on a machine that was not acting how their own worked?
 
OS6-OSX said:
Check Youtube for adding Rosetta to 10.8 during installation. There are several videos there on that. Knowing Rosetta is there may take out "I don't know about this" move :)
Click to expand...
Don't bother with YouTube:

Purchase Snow Leopard Server from the Apple Store, now at a 95% reduction in price: $19.99 + sales tax & shipping - 1.800.MYAPPLE (1.800.692.7753) - Apple Part Number: MC588Z/A (telephone orders only).

Follow Parallels' instructions to install Snow Leopard Server (and Rosetta) and have concurrent ability to run PowerPC applications and Mountain Lion. Parallels 8 available at a 40% reduction in price for 3 more days as part of the March 2013 MacUpdate 10 App bundle:

Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) Photoshop running in Snow Leopard Server in Parallels 8:

[click on image to enlarge]
 

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KaraH said:
Dos prompt? Ones and zeros! Get off my lawn! :)

Lots of us disparagingly used the term WIMPs on some computers in the 80s: windows, icons, menus, and pulldowns. Not that we hated them because they were knew but because there was not 100% of the resources doing what the user wanted. During my amiga phase one of the things I loved the most was I could quit the gui if I did not need it and give a speed boost to things.
Click to expand...

Yeah, in an odd intangible way I was part of the crowd calling out "wimp" too. Times have changed since then and GUI's are the accepted norm. I was also an Amiga freak (Assembly language developer) BTW. Notice anything reminiscent of my avatar? ;)

And finally you can still dump the entire OS X GUI and go CLI all the way if you like. It's real easy to get there too. I do it sometimes myself. Considering that 10.7 and 10.8 are still better than 10.6. :D I like CLI interfaces. It offers a rewarding level of direct control with fewer limitations. I'm also very glad to have a GUI tho.. ;)
 
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seveej said:
Darn,

First time ever I have to disagree with something from Tesselator.
Click to expand...

Really? I'm very flattered. Even I disagree with me more often than that. :)



My problem with this post is not that it disparages people of the "if it works, don't fix it"-clan, it also bypasses two of the heaviest reasons why some people will need to stick with snow leopard:
- Rosetta (well publicized)
- changes in SMB - support (see http://webdiary.com/2012/08/31/lion-smb/)

Due to these two lion absolutely ruined a month for me.

I do not discourage trying out ML, but anyone not heeding justperry's advice is looking for trouble.

RGDS,
Click to expand...

Yeah, I guess I see some logic in that. But at the same time these are computers... running software... so everything is and probably always will be, still doable from version to version. Even as things seemingly disappear they're usually still there or only slightly morphed. A good example and case in point here is your M.I.A. SMB client. Abracadabra <taps his magic wand>, behold:
Magic, I know... :)
 
Tesselator said:
Nope! :) This is a misunderstanding of OS X. Nothing in ML or Lion eats CPU cycles any more than in OS X 10.4, 10.5, or 10.6 and in fact typically configured it's less. Memory footprint is virtually identical to 10.6 (± a few megabytes) and I don't remember what it was in 10.5 or 10.4. I/O is far less in Lion than in 10.6 as the dynamic pager profile and scheduling in SL was insane. Although it's still not perfect in Lion either. ML is a slight improvement in that regard but still needs work IMO.

But I completely understand the misunderstanding. There s a lot of misinformed opinion out there and so much of it is posted with authority. Just the other day I read a thread of supposed "tips" here saying how you could speed up your mac by removing Dashboard widgets. As he explained it they run in the BG and also are loaded into RAM even if not used. Both 100% untrue of course but it was said with authority so I'm sure most people reading it believed it. There were a bunch of other so called "tips" in that list which were also 100% wrong and a few of them even potentially detrimental to the stability of OS X itself.

Anyway, no, Lion and ML use actually less I/O and CPU cycles than 10.6.8 do - this can be profiled using some of the developer tools distributed by Apple and/or member developers.

Attributes and features which do use resources (like for example Window drop-shodows) once turned off seise to tax the system in any way. Off is off in all of the cases I can think of.
Click to expand...

Genuine question, explain to me why ML needs more than 2 GB RAM while on my Powerbook it needs 200 MB?
It also has a lot less processes running than ML, I know those processes need no or little CPU resources but they do need RAM.
 
justperry said:
Genuine question, explain to me why ML needs more than 2 GB RAM while on my Powerbook it needs 200 MB?
It also has a lot less processes running than ML, I know those processes need no or little CPU resources but they do need RAM.
Click to expand...

I dunno it just depends. We would need to look at them on a process by process basis to understand everything fully. Many processes are dynamically initialized and dumped so it would also depend on when you looked and additionally would probably be different every time you looked. Also depending on how much RAM you have OS X may decide to keep things around longer or dump them sooner. I don't know what you have installed so I can't answer the question. But try this if you have an extra partition free to use:

Pull any unrequired PCIe cards, extra drives, USB devices, Firewire devices, extra monitors, and so on. Uninstall any RAM above what your Laptop has. Install ML fresh on the free partition - do not migrate anything. Reboot. Eject all other volumes but the system partition. Wait 20 to 30min. Then look at your activity monitor or whatever you use to view processes. It should be pretty close to the same. I say pretty close because the profiles, schedules, and BG processes needed for a laptop differ quite a bit from those used on a desktop machine - but generally it should be in the same ballpark.

If it's not and you can see something that is hogging RAM which you determine isn't useful there probably have already been a few hundred (or thousand?) people who reached the same conclusion and have blogged about the solutions - turning it off, replacing it with an older version, or whatever.
 
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Tesselator said:
I dunno it just depends. We would need to look at them on a process by process basis to understand everything fully. Many processes are dynamically initialized and dumped so it would also depend on when you looked and additionally would probably be different every time you looked. Also depending on how much RAM you have OS X may decide to keep things around longer or dump them sooner. I don't know what you have installed so I can't answer the question. But try this if you have an extra partition free to use:

Pull any unrequired PCIe cards, USB devices, Firewire devices, extra monitors, and so on. Uninstall any RAM above what your Laptop has. Install ML fresh on the free partition. Reboot. Eject all other volumes but the system partition. Wait 20 to 30min. Then look at your activity monitor or whatever you use to view processes. It should be pretty close to the same.
Click to expand...

I bought a 2012 Mini a couple of weeks ago, I then used Migration Assistant to get the stuff from the Powerbook, never again, big mistake, next time I will just move over data and nothing more.
Part of the problem was that I removed all Intel code from my former 10.5 install, had to clean up after migration.
I know OS X, have been using it since 10.0 but skipped 10.6 and 10.7, does not run on PB, now I can't do a clean install, the download is 4.4 GB and I am not in a position to download that over the internet with my package.
I know I should do this and see what happens.
But even if I log into a new user account it still eats 2 GB, way too much.
I will probably buy a nightime (24.00-06.00) package for a few dollars and start over again.

Only then I can say if it really eats lots more memory, sadly I didn't check before I migrated my stuff.

------

As for ML, it some things really suck, Lauchpad, Missioncontrol are two things which are just eye candy and Leopard and SL were much better IMO.
 
What are real benefits of ML over SL?
Click to expand...

I am a big fan of Snow Leopard, however I switched to ML for it's native driver support for newer graphics cards and USB 3.0.

As for the GUI, probably the only new feature I like is that instant messages appear on the desktop so I can reply with a full keyboard, screen, and mouse instead of picking up my "iToy" and replying there.
 
justperry said:
I know those processes need no or little CPU resources but they do need RAM.
Click to expand...

No they don't. A process that is using no CPU resources can be paged out with little impact on that process's performance levels.

You maybe confused by with wired , active, and inactive RAM all being "used". The disk caching in Mountain Lion is different also. Again RAM used but not really the active applications being "bigger hogs".

If the OS has more RAM available it should use it. If the average Mac has 4GB of RAM that then settling in nominal usage at 2GB can easily make for a faster box. More shared libraries are "preloaded" , bigger disk caches , etc. There is little to no speed advantage to empty RAM not being used at all. Those disk cache and preloaded assignments are not necessarily fixed. If more apps need more of scarce RAM then the disk caches can be dynamically shrunk.
 
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Luis Ortega said:
I have a 2008 2 x 2.8ghz mac pro with 16 gb ram, a gtx 285, 4 hdd including a boot ssd and a bluray burner.
I do mostly FCP (not X) and Photoshop editing, along with the usual lighter computer stuff like internet, emails, etc.
I run OSX SL 10.6.8 and everything works well.
I have avoided going to L or ML because they seem to be obsessed with ios gimmickry rather than useful performance enhancements like better memory use, better multi-core use, etc.
I have no need for the ios gimmicks in ML, but I have noticed that some apps require the use of L or ML rather than SL.

My question is, are there any real benefits in terms of computer performance and the use of resources that ML has over SL or is it all about added ios gimmicks?
And would going from SL to ML create any compatibility issues with my current software and hardware?
Thanks for any advice.
Click to expand...

Luis,
I have 3 Macs. My 2009 MacPro is my main animation station and I'd postponed upgrading it's OS. Like you I was sitting with 10.6.8. I decided to get an SSD drive for it and new video card. I did the upgrade on Saturday. The new card requires 10.8.3. I was surprised at how quickly, easily and trouble-free the upgrade was. And I find that I like it better. Plus the cloud is nice syncing my various computers.
 
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