A question to ML Users

[ishimura2446]

New to the forums, not new to macs glad to have finally joined here.

Anyway my question to all ML users is whether anyone experiences, well I don't know how else to say it, but a slower response time in the newer OS than Snow Leopard. By Slower response time I mean from the UI and the launching of programs. For example when I launch textedit it takes a good 5 to 10 seconds to launch in ML, where as in SL it loads instantly. I am not going to complain about ML on the whole as there are features I want to take advantage of and upgrade however my user experience has been suffering and I have switched back to SL for now.

I have a Macbook Polycarbonate 2010,
2.4GHZ C2D
4GB Of Ram
250GB HD

I have tested launch times on my girlfriends Macbook Pro 2012
i5
8GB of Ram
500GB HD

She has the same slow response times as myself and her MBP came with it pre-installed.

I don't get it, I have done upgrades, and tried clean installs yet I can't figure out what is degrading our experience. Has anyone had this happen and resolved it? If so any tips?

[throAU]

ML does more - and everything it is doing doesn't come for free. Yes apps take longer to launch.

3d performance is better though. Security is better.


Time moves on.

[ishimura2446]

Originally Posted by throAU

ML does more - and everything it is doing doesn't come for free. Yes apps take longer to launch.

3d performance is better though. Security is better.

I understand all that. I am willing to trade better security for a hit on performance, 3d performance I could care less about, but I am sure there are others who enjoy the improvement. I was just curious if anyone has some tips for speeding up their machine. It's sad that my girlfriends pretty MBP is so sluggish I will finally bite the bullet and upgrade my machine tonight.

Thanks for your input!

[TSE]

I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion with my MacBook Pro in the signature. Went from 6-7 hours of battery life to 4.5-6. Was 3-4 before I turned iCloud off. Snow Leopard used about 2 GBs of RAM sitting idle. Mountain Lion uses about 3.

Only reason I upgraded is updated security, some improved UI features, and the improved Safari. Was it worth it? I don't know... Snow Leopard didn't have a web browser I liked (Safari 5 had issues with flash performance, I refuse to use Chrome due to my dislike for Google, Opera is just bad, and Firefox has too many memory leaks), and so far I really enjoy Safari 6. However, I hate how I have to compromise for this.

[ishimura2446]

Originally Posted by TSE

I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion with my MacBook Pro in the signature. Went from 6-7 hours of battery life to 4.5-6. Was 3-4 before I turned iCloud off. Snow Leopard used about 2 GBs of RAM sitting idle. Mountain Lion uses about 3.

Only reason I upgraded is updated security, some improved UI features, and the improved Safari. Was it worth it? I don't know... Snow Leopard didn't have a web browser I liked (Safari 5 had issues with flash performance, I refuse to use Chrome due to my dislike for Google, Opera is just bad, and Firefox has too many memory leaks), and so far I really enjoy Safari 6. However, I hate how I have to compromise for this.

I have sat comfy on SL, I prefer the familiar feel of what I guess we can call Classic OSX before the IOS feature integration, but progress carries on. I secretly hope that Apple hits an XP situation with SL so perhaps they will slow down their drastic development model, if not I have a feeling they will soon begin pushing new OS releases yearly instead of pushing updates and supporting the releases for a set amount of product lifetime.

[throAU]

What I find myself doing with ML more is leaving apps open, sleeping the machine rather than shutting down and avoiding the increased startup time that way.

If you can afford it, rolling your own fusion drive should speed things up significantly, without needing to deal with manually moving files on and off SSD like you'd need to with snow leopard.

[ishimura2446]

Thanks for the advice, I usually sleep my machine however I do close my programs all the time instead of letting them idle. I did purchase a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive but I got a lemon and sent it back and just haven't had the time to re-order a new one.

Last night I loaded Lion just for giggles to see how it compared to ML and found that Lion is quick and snappy even while Spotlight was indexing after initial boot compared to ML. This seems contradictory to what I have read about users experience with ML after upgrading as most people welcome the upgrade and performance improvements over Lion.

[rhoydotp]

Originally Posted by throAU

Security is better.

which new security features did they add to make it better and can make a machine slower? just curious. thanks

[throAU]

Originally Posted by rhoydotp

which new security features did they add to make it better and can make a machine slower? just curious. thanks

Compared to Snow Leopard?

address space layout randomization (don't think snow leopard had it at all - can't remember)
Gatekeeper
Sandboxing

Compared to Lion?

Better address space layout randomization
Gatekeeper (though that has been backported to 10.7.5)



I'm not saying those features necessarily make it slower - my point was that the trade-off is worth paying because of the inherently more secure architecture vs previous versions.

Better ASLR makes it harder for a hacker to get an exploit in a buggy program to reliably run, as the memory location all code is loaded to is randomized. I.e., he might be able to find a hole, and he might be able to use that to jump to some memory location to run code - but the code he's expecting to be there may not be there due to the randomization.

Gatekeeper enables the user to turn off running unsigned code by default. This can prevent an attacker writing code that will run with no user intervention. To get code to run without user intervention by default it must now be signed with a developer certificate that apple can revoke.

This will limit the spread of malware, if any is written.


Apple has been somewhat lucky so far with OS X security. It hasn't ALL been luck, but there has been luck involved.

In the past, up against say Windows XP and earlier it has been more secure by default. But Lion and Mountain Lion are only just really catching up to where Vista and Windows 7 have been for some time as far as in-built OS countermeasures are concerned.

The OS X code may or may not be of higher qualty making exploits less likely to be written (my view is that its simply a smaller target at the moment), but the new countermeasures make the assumption that there WILL be bugs. If there are bugs, the new features limit the ability to exploit.

Previous versions didn't have these countermeasures and relied on software simply not having exploitable bugs.

Lion and ML take OS X security to the next level - even if there are bugs, they are a lot harder to exploit, and use to gain control of your machine.

----------

Originally Posted by ishimura2446

Last night I loaded Lion just for giggles to see how it compared to ML and found that Lion is quick and snappy even while Spotlight was indexing after initial boot compared to ML. This seems contradictory to what I have read about users experience with ML after upgrading as most people welcome the upgrade and performance improvements over Lion.

In my experience, most of the speed improvements in Lion look like they have been back-ported to Lion in 10.7.4.


10.7.3 and previous versions of Lion were a lot slower than 10.7.4 onwards is.

Like Vista before it, a lot of the crap Lion copped on release is not totally deserved any more. It has improved considerably. Sure, if you hated the changes they are still there. But the performance is better.

[davidlv]

Originally Posted by ishimura2446

New to the forums, not new to macs glad to have finally joined here.
Anyway my question to all ML users is whether anyone experiences, well I don't know how else to say it, but a slower response time in the newer OS than Snow Leopard. By Slower response time I mean from the UI and the launching of programs. For example when I launch textedit it takes a good 5 to 10 seconds to launch in ML, where as in SL it loads instantly. I am not going to complain about ML on the whole as there are features I want to take advantage of and upgrade however my user experience has been suffering and I have switched back to SL for now.
I have a Macbook Polycarbonate 2010,
2.4GHZ C2D
4GB Of Ram
250GB HD
I have tested launch times on my girlfriends Macbook Pro 2012
i5
8GB of Ram
500GB HD
She has the same slow response times as myself and her MBP came with it pre-installed.
I don't get it, I have done upgrades, and tried clean installs yet I can't figure out what is degrading our experience. Has anyone had this happen and resolved it? If so any tips?

ML seems to really run best on an SSD, my 2011 Mac mini feels about the same, from a "response" perpective, as an old G5, and so did my MBP before I installed an SSD. Now the MBP is not just fast, it is instantaneous.
So I suspect that with ML, the OS and/or IO subsystems have been optimized for use with an SSD. The minimal memory requirement has grown too, with 4GB as the lowest possible and 8GB as a more reasonable figure. Sure you may be able to install ML on a system with 2Gb, but it won't be easy to get any real work done on a system like that.
Consider installing an SSD in both "his/her" machines? I consider the 16,000 yen I spent as the best investment I have made in years.

[rhoydotp]

Originally Posted by throAU

Compared to Snow Leopard?

address space layout randomization (don't think snow leopard had it at all - can't remember)
Gatekeeper
Sandboxing

...

I'm not saying those features necessarily make it slower - my point was that the trade-off is worth paying because of the inherently more secure architecture vs previous versions.

...

The OS X code may or may not be of higher qualty making exploits less likely to be written (my view is that its simply a smaller target at the moment), but the new countermeasures make the assumption that there WILL be bugs. If there are bugs, the new features limit the ability to exploit.

...

Previous versions didn't have these countermeasures and relied on software simply not having exploitable bugs.

Lion and ML take OS X security to the next level - even if there are bugs, they are a lot harder to exploit, and use to gain control of your machine.

----------

ASLR is definitely an improvement but still should only incur a small amount of performance hit especially if it's built in to the kernel. Every major OS is starting to use some sort of ASLR algo, so there is nothing special here.

I hate the implementation of the GateKeeper compared to the "warning" on SL. Yes, the initial thought is to prevent users from inadvertently running a malicious software. just my preference though, some people likes being controlled

I agree with you regarding OSX not being a major target ... yet. But having solid unix-background definitely helps and I hope they don't deviate from that.

Previous versions relied mostly on the users not doing something stupid. Even today's "counter-measure" can be exploited in many different ways ... Harder? Maybe so.

Anyway, thanks for the good discussion. I hate it when some people here argue about something that they don't really have any clue on what they are arguing about!

----------

Originally Posted by davidlv

Sure you may be able to install ML on a system with 2Gb, but it won't be easy to get any real work done on a system like that.

learned this the hard way. i got a 4Gb upgrade kit coming in so let's see how much improvement I get