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Why is OS X slower than a frozen turd?

mangoman

mangoman

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 27, 2002
931
61
Second Floor
I finally gotta vent (and I'll be brief, I promise). I'm running the latest version of OS X on a Quicksilver 933 with 1.25GB of RAM. I expect a lot more snap, crackle AND pop outta my OS, but I see this $%# beach ball WAY too much (iCal's a great example). Come ON, Apple!
 
OsX is a resource hog, and apple computers have been using g4's for to long. But look at it this way, the current base powermac is only a 1 giger so you are still current! We hope one day Apple will wake up and say to itself, gee we need faster hardware. When they get around to giving us that hardware i will buy a new machine. But this keeps us all current a lot longer.:eek:
 
Re: Why is OS X slower than a frozen turd?

Originally posted by mangoman
I finally gotta vent (and I'll be brief, I promise). I'm running the latest version of OS X on a Quicksilver 933 with 1.25GB of RAM. I expect a lot more snap, crackle AND pop outta my OS, but I see this $%# beach ball WAY too much (iCal's a great example). Come ON, Apple!
Click to expand...

I've got a dual 867 and I rarely see the beachball in most apps (although I don't use iCal, which is notoriously slow). If you really feel like going to a lot of trouble for speed, back everything up, reformat, and reinstall (that will speed things up, although I don't know how much).
 
Yeah, the reinstall has entered my mind. But without boring the crap outta you, trust me when I say I run a clean system. OS X on it's own partition, never use Classic, repair permissions on a regular basis (once or twice a week), run MacJanitor, etc, etc...

Sigh...

Looks like this 'old' 933 is gonna be my server tower once the new machines are released.
 
Yeah really, I have 1 processor 800 MHZ iMac and I rarily get the beachball spinning inless I really want to see it, iTunes, folding, external CD burn and A game... :D

I was supprise how I didn't get it.
 
I run on a dual MDD with no problems. Even my old Graphite 500 MHZ does reasonably well. I only have beach ball issues with my iBook.

Perhaps there is a way to cut some of the fat from OS X?

Dan
 
If you have OSX on one partition and your apps on another then this is your major problem. Unfortunately you have to have the apps on the same partition as the OS.
I know this was not the case with OS9 and I thought OSX should be set up the same way. When I reformatted and installed the OS and APPS on the main partition I realised a MAJOR speed increase.
I still have a separate partition for use as a scratch disk and another drive for my work files.
 
I have an iBook 800 w/640MB Ram and I rarely see the beachball, so it sounds like whatever problem your having is fixable- your computer should run OS X blazingly fast, I'd think.
 
when i first upgraded to jag, i was so dissapointed with my machine that i actually had it on ebay. but then, someone here told me to reformat and reinstall. after that my system was much better.

I made one partition of ten gigs for my system AND applications. and the rest was used for my second partition which holds all my documents. i dont use the home folder apple has set up for me. i would if i could put it on a seperate partition but i dont think i can.

oh and im on a 667 ti with 512 of ram. i see an occassional app take a bit longer to open, or a menu will need to render for half second, but for the most part, its fine. its solid. i would think with a better graphics card then me and with your faster hard drive plus processor you would be running fine.

if you havent already, i would seriously suggest reformating. and keep your apps in the apps folder. i dont even organize my apps folder. but i do make an Applications Alias folder thats organized.

i was told somewhere to leave your apps were the system puts them...so i do.
 
Maybe it's some OS X voodoo. My OS AND all the Applications (unorganized by the way - left 'em where they landed) are ALL on the same fat partition. OS 9 stays lonely on its own partition. A third partition holds my graphic files.

Oh, and this reformat is fairly fresh. 'Bout five months old.

Am I missing something else?
 
Originally posted by mmoin
I have an iBook 800 w/640MB Ram and I rarely see the beachball, so it sounds like whatever problem your having is fixable- your computer should run OS X blazingly fast, I'd think.
Click to expand...
its fast at times on my 800mhz ibook, but the beachball shows up a little too much for me, but its mainly due to m$ based appz...if only ppl knew that msn messenger was crud...
i cant believe how slow the boot up is for osx, i remember hearing "jaguar is fast for everything" and that the beachball very rarely shows up..but thats lies :p
hopefully 10.3 is a free upgrade and has lots of speed upgrades
 
Originally posted by mangoman
Maybe it's some OS X voodoo. My OS AND all the Applications (unorganized by the way - left 'em where they landed) are ALL on the same fat partition. OS 9 stays lonely on its own partition. A third partition holds my graphic files.

Oh, and this reformat is fairly fresh. 'Bout five months old.

Am I missing something else?
Click to expand...


so youve had this problem with multiple installs of jag? well then i dont know what to tell you. dont run norton and if you did you will have to reformat (at least i did) to recover performance.

maybe you and i have different ideas of what is too slow.
 
mangoman, you did mention iChat as being frozen-turd-slow and loaded with beachballs. That's a network thing, isn't it? Are you going to AIM servers with it? Is the machine acceptable for purely local apps?

I tried iChat once and said "high on cute but low on functionality" and never ran it again. Maybe the group's not beating on it enough.
 
I am also running a quicksilver 933, but i only have 512 megs of ram and rarely see the beach ball. I do a good deal of intensive work in photoshop, illustrator, indesign, and freehand and never have problems with speed. Sure some actions and filters take longer than i would like but i can wait a few seconds. The speed really is not that noticable on mine especially compared to the time it takes to print preliminary work (the actual printing not the computers part of it). I have not used iCal so maybe i would notice it there but otherwise i have no problems.

What type of work are you doing that you have such a speed problem with?
 
Ive got a PB Ti 1ghz and I dont see the ball unless its involving appletalk (which ive been having increasing problems with). Even when using 2 or 3 apps plus playing Quake3 in windowed mode, i dont see the ball.
 
I dont use iCal amittedly, but I find myself shutting down at night and wondering how on earth I managed to do so much work without any beachballs. OSX doesnt seem to care what is open, the main reaction being the fan coming on rather than diminishing onscreen performance. Its not Windows snappy, but over the course of a day OSX is very fast.

I appreciate that there is a lot of trial and error getting the preferences set up right, but if you say you are all uptogether with software, have you looked into hardware problems. You may have a dodgy USB device causing a conflict. I would normally suggest pulling non factory installed RAM, but that wont necessarily help define your speed issue.
 
fonts?

The day I opened Flash under OS 10.2 to change a Font was the day it became clear to me why that damned spinning beachball popped up every time I wanted to do something.

OS 10.2 sucks in every font installed on the system (OS 10.2 and 9.2, I discovered through Flash that OS 10.2 had installed every font on all my drives: in my case 6000+) regardless as to where or how, although these fonts were not visible in the font utility (they were visible to Flash!). I removed particularly all but the 3 system fonts from OS 9.2 and run them now over Suitcase.

Result: Beachball gone

I don't know if this is of any help, but I couldn't find any mention of it at Apple, I had tried everything I had read on every forum, including a new install, to no avail, but I did find it strange that some users had the problem and some didn't, so I concluded that it didn't have anything to do directly with OS 10.2, but something I was doing with it.
 
Re: fonts?

Originally posted by anjaki
I don't know if this is of any help, but I couldn't find any mention of it at Apple, I had tried everything I had read on every forum, including a new install, to no avail, but I did find it strange that some users had the problem and some didn't, so I concluded that it didn't have anything to do directly with OS 10.2, but something I was doing with it.
Click to expand...

Good points. Thanks for mentioning that. I'm running the latest version of Suitcase. It's not perfect, but close enough.

Speaking of perfect, my hat is off to all who've contributed to this thread. I took the afternoon off from staring at my monitor -- a good call. I think I'm whining a bit too loudly about my speed issues. Instead, I oughta be thankful to have two RAM-fat G4's networked in one room.

So thanks for the feedback, all. I'm sure your input will benefit many (including dolts like me who need a change in perspective...)

Cheers.
 
Since I loaded the latest Java update (v1.4.1), I've seen many beachballs and seen my system slow to a crawl while running folding@home and a browser with Java applets on the page.

Recently, I changed a Java application from using the Aqua look-and-feel to the Java look-and-feel and the CPU usage dipped from 40+ percent to around 1 percent. It is just one example of eye candy gone bad. All those liquid effects cost dearly.

Still, on a busy system, Mac OS X is much faster than Mac OS 9 even though the user interface is slower. You've got to wonder that, if Mac OS X had a flattened GUI such as Java or Mac OS 9 or Windows or KDE or Gnome, would it be extremely quick?

I think the answer is yes.
 
Another good point. I'd love to see a flattened version. Bet your very right about a potential speed increase.
 
But how much of the eye candy would you be willing to give up for speed?

XP has this feature where you can disable all the menu animations and other unnecessary resource hogging (but nice looking) widgets but the result is one fugly UI, worse than any 9x versions of Windows.
 
One thing to check, is to see if Netinfo is on. Go to: Applications: Utilities: Directory Access: Services: and uncheck the netinfo box if it's selected. I had a similar problem, and this fixed it. The computer is just searching for the Netinfo server, and the service can make the system slow way down if it can't find it. Also, if you're not using apple talk shut it off too. Apple talk is not as much of a resource hog, but if you're not using it you don't need it running.

Hope this helps.

Physicsnerd.
 
Thanks for the tip. The Net thing was already off, but I unchecked AppleTalk and Rendevous, too.

Besides, what the heck do I need Rendevous on for at this point? Am I wrong on this point?
 
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