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general osx performance question

C

Cubiq

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 18, 2008
10
0
I have a 3,06GHz 24" imac which I love. What I really don't understand is why my mac is able to run 3d games at 120fps but itunes lags when scrolling a couple of hundreds songs, or opening a dock folder becomes deadly slow with just a dozen files in it, or again firefox and safari become unresponsive with very long pages (maybe with flash).

The other day I was playing with itunes on windows and I was surpriced to see that it was more responsive than the mac counterpart. What is happing? Will the snow leopard help overall performance?

Please note that I am complaining about mac performance, I will never let a win machine enter my home/office again :) I'm just wondering why the finder and generally common UI tasks are sometimes slower than linux or windows.
 
Something doesn't sound quite right. You may want to repair permissions or check to see what else is running. I can high-speed scroll though my almost 30,000 song library in iTunes on a 2.5GHz MBP without a hiccup. I've never had a problem opening folders on my Mac HD or external drives, either. Something's amiss!
 
I'm not totally sure why you're having those issues. My iMac (sig) isn't as beefed up as yours and iTunes loads much faster than you're saying you're getting. It loads 2443 songs with art in ~3-4 sec.

I agree with you about the flash issue with safari load times. I believe that is an issue that Snow Leopard will fix. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't game on computers, I leave it to consoles so that is something I can't speak to.
 
In general, "why is this slow" is a difficult question to answer *even for the developer of the program*. Apple provides some superb tools for diagnosing performance issues (Shark, sample, Instruments, etc...) but they do require a good bit of programming knowledge to use and interpret correctly.

<edit>
Drag'nGT: I see no reason to expect that Snow Leopard will change the behavior of Flash significantly.
</edit>
 
I have the feeling that there's a lot of not well optimized HP inside this mac.

Another example. I use dvdpedia to manage my dvd/bd collection. Why is it so slow to scroll covers? I don't play games on my Mac but I'm sure that any modern game can play full screen 60fps... but I can't scroll through my dvd collection?

I usually put in my dock a couple of most used folders. I sort item by date, display as folder, view content as grid. When there are more than (say) 30 elements inside the folders I get a very laggy animation of the opening stack. I can edit my hd movies in realtime, but opening a folder is slow? Isn't this a paradox?
 
I was wondering about OSX performance as well: apart from boot times everything, especially the UI, seems more sluggish than windows; then there's the stuff that is undoubtedly slower, like videos: I tried opening a small mpeg1 music video in iTunes and it was stuttering.
For all the praise OSX gets one would imagine it should be able to handle stuff like media playback at least on par with the competition.
Clarification: I am comparing OSX 10.5 to Vista installed on the same mac with bootcamp.
 
Cubiq said:
I can edit my hd movies in realtime, but opening a folder is slow? Isn't this a paradox?
Click to expand...

Sequential disk IO is a lot easier to optimize than random access. You can prefetch data very effectively, for example. Again, without applying the proper tools, generalizing and guessing about performance is basically meaningless. Even experienced programmers working on their own code are consistently wrong about why it's slow.
 
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