BENCHMARKED: Mac mini 2009 + Yosemite = MEGA slow!

[MuzakaEklekta]

This pretty much confirms my suspicions about the UI.

The graphics/UI test seen here shows Yosemite getting absolutely annihilated by Mavericks. Yosemite is a clean install btw.

I also did a CPU and Memory test which was close, but Mavericks won that too.

This difference has real world effect. The UI feels very sluggish. Mavericks' UI is about 4.5 times faster!

Why is Yosemite SO slow?

UPDATE [25-10-2014]

Videos demonstrating this issue:

Resizing a window in Mavericks: http://youtu.be/174ugKsj6z4
Resizing a window in Yosemite: http://youtu.be/1TMh5Pjj4uk

 

[873089]

Why is Yosemite SO slow?

Bad coding?

Or Apple wants you to buy their new mini

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

To be honest, I can't think of any other reason than those.

Unless of course it's something major like the UI has made a jump from raster to vector elements?

 

[Agent-J]

Is there transparency or something that can be turned off? Egads, that's bad. I'm getting closer and closer to just staying with Mavericks.

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

Yeah, that was benchmarked with transparency turned off. The difference between the two is night and day. I would categorically say that Mavericks is as far as the 2009 Mac mini should go, for whatever reason that is.

 

[Richard8655]

Is that an early or late 2009 Mac Mini? I have an early 2009 with Mavericks and was about to upgrade to Yosemite. It's already pretty slow, but was hoping Yosemite would improve performance.

But egads, based on your nicely done bench test, it looks like it would be a fall into a deep cavern you can't get out of. Methinks best to stay on Mavericks.

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

Yeah, it's the early 2009. I have a dual boot so haven't committed yet. I think I will stay with Mavericks.

 

[GreatDrok]

Yeah, it's the early 2009. I have a dual boot so haven't committed yet. I think I will stay with Mavericks.

I have a late 2009 mini which has been on the Yosemite beta from the start. I did notice it was very sluggish but I had needed a bigger and better disc so I popped a 960GB SSD in and upgraded the RAM to 8GB. Feels fine now. It was largely the disc that was causing it to be slow but the extra RAM helps too.

 

[Richard8655]

For sure, I agree best to stay. Glad you posted this, thanks. Saved many of us 2009 owners some regretable grief.

I think we can probably continue ok with the early 2009, but I'm guessing it might be time to upgrade at the next Mac Mini upgrade cycle (in 2 years?). Trying to resist the current cycle.

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

As a side note, I have 4GB ram and an SSD installed so can't squeeze much more out of it. It is obviously Apple no longer paying attention to the driver for the GeForce 9400 chipset.

 

[Darby67]

You mention you are dual boot, how much disk space did you allocate to Yosemite?

 

[brdeveloper]

As a side note, I have 4GB ram and an SSD installed so can't squeeze much more out of it. It is obviously Apple no longer paying attention to the driver for the GeForce 9400 chipset.

I installed Yosemite on my late-2009 Macbook (9400m graphics) for testing (my production laptop is an early-2013 rMBP). I'm a bit disappointed seeing this. Hopefully there will be driver hacks for updating the standard one.

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

You mention you are dual boot, how much disk space did you allocate to Yosemite?

20GB, 11GB free. The Mavericks partition has roughly the same, so it's not swap file related.

I did a CPU and memory benchmark too and while Mavericks also won that, the difference wasn't as great as the UI benchmark.

 

[Darby67]

Certainly curious. I wouldn't be surprised to see the score change somewhat, but not by that much. Perhaps Spotlight was indexing like crazy while you were running Xbench? You check Activity Monitor to see if something else was hogging the CPU?

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

I didn't have activity monitor open to check.

I am tempted to do a more comprehensive test, however, since the first public preview, the slow UI has always been the case, to the point where you don't need really need a benchmark to check.

The results merely help show others, as a video clip demo could affect GUI redraw benchmark results.

Basically, windows and UI elements are sometimes slow to draw, window dragging jittery.

The no.1 most noticeable effect of this reduced speed is when using the zoom (Ctrl+Scroll).

I have used the zoom for years (hooked up to tv, helps with distance). Up until Mavericks, the zoom has been butter smooth. When I casually zoomed in Yosemite, it stood out like a sore thumb. Very low refresh/redraw rate. Without a shadow of a doubt.

Something has changed drastically in Yosemite and I'd love to know what.

 

[Acronyc]

Thanks for this info. I have an early 2009 mini I use as a media/file server and, as expected, I think performance issues will make me to stick with Mavericks. Which is fine, I barely use the system with a monitor.

 

[cinealta]

I have an early 2009 mini I use as a media/file server and, as expected, I think performance issues will make me to stick with Mavericks.

I may roll my 2009 MM back to Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion.

 

[jlxz]

I have a Macmini early 2009 and Yosemite is running flawless.
I have a Crucial M4 SSD 128GB as main disk and maxed out RAM to 8GB. Never had any issues with Mavericks and I'm very happy using Yosemite.
Upgrading to a SSD and 8GB RAM (max supported by this model) is really worth it.
I have plans to update this year or maybe next to a new macmini, because I'm doing now a lot of video conversion and Core2Duo is terrible slow (4 hours for an hour of video), but for the basic tasks (even gaming in Parallels) is perfect.

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

I have a Macmini early 2009 and Yosemite is running flawless.

Would you mind running an Xbench [download DMG] graphics/ui test and sharing your results? I would love to know how it compares having the extra 4GB ram. Maybe more VRAM is being allocated.

 

[noob17]

late 2009 mac mini

I have the late 2009 mac mini with 4gb ram and a 128gb ssd... its been struggling with yosemite when i do more than one thing on the screen... so like streaming an episode of something online while browsing on the net.

From the guy who mentioned his 8gb model doesnt have any issue, im considering buying more RAM. can someone else confirm that 8gb ram will make it betteR?

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

Yeah, I wondered if more VRAM is assigned if there is more system RAM, however, i think 256MB VRAM is the max. There have been discussions on this before (here).

 

[aajeevlin]

Yeah, I wondered if more VRAM is assigned if there is more system RAM, however, i think 256MB VRAM is the max. There have been discussions on this before (here).

Image

So I just ran the test for you real quick. I've got a Early 2009, HDD, 8GB of RAM. Ran the test with your setting and I'm getting a 48.75.

Now, I've never been a big fan of these numbers, but Yosemite on my mini rans just fine. I'm not sure if you are basing all of your conclusion from just looking at the numbers, or if you are hardcore gamer. But since installation I have been using it like before, and I can hardly tell the different between 10.10 and 10.9.

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

So I just ran the test for you real quick. I've got a Early 2009, HDD, 8GB of RAM. Ran the test with your setting and I'm getting a 48.75.

Now, I've never been a big fan of these numbers, but Yosemite on my mini rans just fine. I'm not sure if you are basing all of your conclusion from just looking at the numbers, or if you are hardcore gamer. But since installation I have been using it like before, and I can hardly tell the different between 10.10 and 10.9.

Thanks for running that As this concludes, my Mac mini isn't on its own. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad realisation!

As stated, I'm not using a benchmark to prove something superficial that can only be seen in benchmarks. Other than recording a video to demonstrate this slower framerate, it's the only way I can show other users that the User Interface is significantly slower to redraw than on Mavericks.

I'm not bothered about OpenGL speed. I'm talking Core Graphics / UI. If you have the luxury to switch between both versions of OS X, test the zoom, resize windows, etc. The difference is night and day (at least for my Mac mini early 2009 with 4GB and 120GB SSD, clean install).

I'll try and capture this difference on video, because if you say that Yosemite runs just as well as Mavericks, I would love to know your secret

 

[elfxmilhouse]

So I just ran the test for you real quick. I've got a Early 2009, HDD, 8GB of RAM. Ran the test with your setting and I'm getting a 48.75.

Now, I've never been a big fan of these numbers, but Yosemite on my mini rans just fine. I'm not sure if you are basing all of your conclusion from just looking at the numbers, or if you are hardcore gamer. But since installation I have been using it like before, and I can hardly tell the different between 10.10 and 10.9.

Thanks for running that As this concludes, my Mac mini isn't on its own. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad realisation!

As stated, I'm not using a benchmark to prove something superficial that can only be seen in benchmarks. Other than recording a video to demonstrate this slower framerate, it's the only way I can show other users that the User Interface is significantly slower to redraw than on Mavericks.

I'm not bothered about OpenGL speed. I'm talking Core Graphics / UI. If you have the luxury to switch between both versions of OS X, test the zoom, resize windows, etc. The difference is night and day (at least for my Mac mini early 2009 with 4GB and 120GB SSD, clean install).

I'll try and capture this difference on video, because if you say that Yosemite runs just as well as Mavericks, I would love to know your secret

I have a late 2009 with 8GB RAM 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD and I got similar benchmark results as you guys. However I am in the same boat as aajeevlin, I don't see much actual day to day impact when using the system compared to Mavericks.

 

[MuzakaEklekta]

Hmm, very strange. Maybe the Mac mini really needs 8GB for Yosemite then. Would love to get more a general consensus on 4GB users feelings vs 8GB users feelings. So far 8GB users seem to not notice much if any UI slowdown.