Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MacRobert10

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 24, 2012
287
46
I have a system using an internal HD with 2 partitions, one being Mavericks and one being Lion. I was having some trouble and thought maybe the drive was the problem. This is an older MacPro.

I figured it was likely the boot region of the drive in Mavericks because the system seemed to be bogging down during bootup. I took a copy of Scannerz and did a 0-20GB sweep of the drive, not the whole thing, to see if it found errors in the boot regions. It found none. I thought then that because when the OS boots it checks other drives and volumes maybe something was wrong with with the Lion partition, so I did a 0-20GB test on it too with Scannerz. Once again, nothing wrong.

I decided to boot into Lion to see if I'm getting the same sort of delay. It didn't. It booted nearly twice as fast as Mavericks though. Once there I decided I might as well repeat my Scannerz tests on the 0-20G regions of both the boot volume (now Lion) and other volume (now the Mavericks volume).

Both scans completed about 20% faster on Lion than they did on Mavericks.

Why is Mavericks so much slower?

Scannerz is a test tool for finding problems, not a performance tool, so when I have time I think I'll try the same stunt using Black Magic speed test.

Anyone else have any comparisons of performance data between different OS versions. It seems to me that the more we go in time the more bogged down the performance is with every newer release of OS X.
 

TheBSDGuy

macrumors 6502
Jan 24, 2012
319
29
I doubt it, or if it is slower Mavericks is only slightly slower.

I saw this and just had to know. My system is multi-boot with a separate partition for development stuff. I booted off of Mavericks, started Black Magic Disk Speed test, set the target to be the development partition and ran a performance test. I then booted off of Lion and did the exact same thing. Lion appeared to be slightly faster but not by much. Considering how short my test was I'd say the difference was statistically insignificant.

I'd be more than willing to bet that mds (Spotlight and Time Machine indexing) was running on your system on one of the tests. mds will slow down anything.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.