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imac vs MacPro (or how to stop beachballin')

B

blurobot

macrumors member
Original poster
May 28, 2009
67
2
I have a strange questions for those of you that have mac pros.

I have a new imac (w 4 gig ram and snow leopard) and while the performances are ok I still see a lot of lag in the os and a lot of beachballs. Especially in vmware, the finder, spaces and expose and the browsers. Once im ina program (like words) everything works fine. the multi tasking seem to be the issue here but I'm unsure.

Now I need a windows xp or 7 machine for day trading via vmware and latency is real important and I'd really hate to leave the mac behind. ideally I'd have a win xp side with trading stuff on one space and the rest on the mac side. spaces is awesome

I'm a heavy multitaskers and I run these programs all day:
mail
coda
netnewswire
firefox (3 windows about 30 tabs)
safari (2 windows 10 tabs)
adium
address book
terminal
itunes
vmware with trading stuff
transmission
words
text edit
mamp

My Q: will a mac pro and a couple of raid0 ssd be essentially beach ball and lag free or is the problem within the software itself (os and 3rd party)? I ask as I often upgraded in the past (both macs and PCs) thinking adding hardware would help a situation and it did but never quite enough.

Basically, will throwing hardware at the problem help enough to make a difference or will it just burn a hole in my pocket? I know for a fact it will help but up to what point? Will all these extra cores be used for multitasking or will they just sit there and idle like in vista? Will there still be lag and beachballs just less so?
 
no actually it's been that way for months on leopard. i upgraded to sl in the hopes that the multitasking would be better. it seem a bit better but not that big a leap...
 
hmm interesting thanks for the link. but why is the multitasking lag in leopard too. i'm sure it's not a sl vs leopard thing as every mac i have have the same prob when i got too many apps open basically i want to know what difference a mac pro makes in the OS itself. I know it's much better for final cut and the likes but in the general OS does it help or is it just not that big of an upgrade?
 
Hm, how much ram is vmware using? Apart from that I don't see much that should eat too many resources.

I mean I use a 2007 2,8 ghz 4gb ram iMac with Mail, Firefox (3-10 tabs), Adium, iCal, iTunes, Adobe Acrobat, Bridge CS4, Illustrator CS4, InDesign CS4, Photoshop CS4 constantly running without any slowdowns most of the time.
 
I have 4 gig of rams and Vmware is set to use 1 processor 512 meg ram with XP and activity monitor reports it using 21.7 meg ram (very strange as safari is using 299 and so is firefox).

The disk activity is always off the charts but it's on an external drive (transmission).

I have 17.47 page in and 5.32 gb page out swap used 3.99 gb but I have no idea what this means?

if you guys are saying your imac almost never slows down then I guess it's not a OS thing it's a hardware prob...

EDIT: it doesnt slow down all the times but sometimes when I move files around or click on vmware or use spaces it lags and some times the imac gets lost so much that I can get up and get something to drink while he sorts itself out. I've seen as many as 2 min lags but most of the time it is snappy just not enough...
 
Experiment with quitting different apps and see what makes a difference. What you're running is simply excessive.

Firefox is notorious for memory leaks, so I'd start there.
 
would a mac pro help me or not?

being a web dev firefox is my most used app :(
 
I know I could pace myself but it's never been my style :)

Coda's rendering engine really sucks I've had tons of bugs. It's good for first tests but not much else (which is odd considering it's basically the same engine as safari). Problem is when working on 4 projects at once I usually keep 1 window / project and I always do lots more at once including day trading and following multiple securities in google finance. As I said I could pace myself but that's a pain in the butt I'd rather throw money at the problem.

Anyways if a mac pro solves my problems then I'll take the plunge next refresh
 
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