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Will Lion ever be as good performance wise as Snow Leopard?

kristoffer4

kristoffer4

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 17, 2006
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What is the general consesus? Will Lion ever be as good a perfomer as Snow Leopard?

Lion uses more CPU and because of this it makes the Macbooks run hotter.
Scrolling in Lion makes the CPU spike.
The shut - down and boot up is longer in Lion.
It eats more ram.

Will this be fixed with .1 or .2 or this simply how the operating system is designed as in because of the new feautures it is not as good a performer as Snow Leopard?

My opinion is that a OS X primarily features is that it should run the hardware in the best and most effective way. Snow Leopard was build around this idea but sadly it seems Lion is not.
 
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Is it really sooo relevant if few second longer boot time ? You might want to switch off the automatic restart of application which is new compared to SL and of course will increase boot time

On work I have now Windows 7 ; feels also a big more laggy but thats because of the Aero effects; switch the off and safe some CPU cycles
 
The only performance problems I have is with Safari, it hogs loads of my RAM

Apart from that it runs just as well as Snow Leopard
 
My Lion outperforms SL on various areas and in some others SL outperforms. So I'd say it's 50/50 so far. Eventually with subsequent updates, Lion will speed up, exactly like SL did in time.
 
Its an interesting question.

It could be argued that SL has a lower resource footprint and should run faster on equivelent hardware, but Lion incorporates newer technologies.

A few years down the line with a few updates Lion could win hands down in every area for everyone, but that'll be after a few updates and running on newer hardware.
 
Having started to take advantage of Lion's full set of features, I no longer quit applications but just close windows. My RAM utilization is up, but so is the performance as I no longer am continually starting applications!

Bootup time was slower but there is a well know network server issue that certainly will be addressed in 10.7.1. Other than that bootup time is just as fast if "resume" is disabled, or if you include the time needed in Snow Leopard to relaunch applications.
 
I find Lion runs just as well or better then Snow Leopard then on my Macs. I like the way Lion as simplified a few things. I think Lion is a pretty solid .0 release. Right now I don't miss Snow Leopard and look forward to the improvements that each update will bring.
 
Early 2009 iMac here, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM and Lion screams on my system.

I'm very pleased with it for a .0 release, and it's noticeably quicker than Snow Leopard in day to day use.

My only "issue", is the amount of RAM Safari and it's Web Content bolt on use.
 
Both of my Macs Geekbench slightly slower on Lion. It's too early to tell whether a future, refined Lion will really be faster than SL. Maybe it will just use more resources to play all the animations and zooms that many serious computer users have already disabled.
 
kristoffer4 said:
What is the general consesus? Will Lion ever be as good a perfomer as Snow Leopard?

Lion uses more CPU and because of this it makes the Macbooks run hotter.
Scrolling in Lion makes the CPU spike.
The shut - down and boot up is longer in Lion.
It eats more ram.

Will this be fixed with .1 or .2 or this simply how the operating system is designed as in because of the new feautures it is not as good a performer as Snow Leopard?

My opinion is that a OS X primarily features is that it should run the hardware in the best and most effective way. Snow Leopard was build around this idea but sadly it seems Lion is not.
Click to expand...
My experience has been the opposite.

Shut down and boot speeds are faster, even on my laptop with FileVault 2 activated.

Don't see any unusual CPU spikes at all when scrolling Safari, Firefox, Word, Pages, etc.

Don't find my MacBook, my daughter's MacBook or wife's MacBook (all C2D processors) or my iMac (quad i7) running any warmer than normal (again, since the CPU usage isn't abnormally high).

I don't see it requiring any more RAM than SL did. Safari is a hog, but always has been.
 
gentlefury said:
Guess I'm just in that lucky 90% of users that have experienced Lion outperforming SL on ALL counts!
Click to expand...

Count me in as one of the happy "minority".

OP, are you sure you don't have a potential software interaction? Have you done all the usual things (e.g. zap PRAM, run Disk Utilities and repaired permissions, allowed Spotlight to finish reindexing...)?
 
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