Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Is the beta at this point worthy of being a daily driver?
- Thread starter Jacoblee23
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I'm having major network issues after the computer sleeps. Would not recommend it, but I installed it on my second test machine.
Funny that you see it that way as I think El Capitan was a big improvement over Yosemite in terms of performance. Might depend on your specific Mac model but general UI animation was poor on Yosemite for me.
I don't have anything with a Retina display.
16A239m: maybe, but I don't use it in that way.
Public beta and beta 2 of the dev both seem to be fine to use on a daily basis, in my opinion. Haven't had any issues really.
I think you can use it as a daily driver, but if you have something absolutely mission critical you might want to wait.
My work is using Mail, Preview, Dropbox, and the Office365 suite, latest fast insider build. There are some weird things that happen sometimes but nothing that's really broken for me. Sometimes files don't drag correctly out of Office (which is a bug that pops up occasionally for me), Preview crashes frequently when combining PDFs or adding pages to PDFs. Office has a few rendering bugs, but I report those to MSFT.
My work is using Mail, Preview, Dropbox, and the Office365 suite, latest fast insider build. There are some weird things that happen sometimes but nothing that's really broken for me. Sometimes files don't drag correctly out of Office (which is a bug that pops up occasionally for me), Preview crashes frequently when combining PDFs or adding pages to PDFs. Office has a few rendering bugs, but I report those to MSFT.
Here's one of those bugs, disclosed in Apple Developer Forums: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49672 - there's a workaround but (compared to the Shift key) it's a tedious approach to enabling or disabling safe boot.
Postscript: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49672#154579 in particular.
Last edited:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/23128028 iCloud Drive
Without safe mode: kernel_task hogs the CPUs so much, from the outset, that most things are close to a standstill. Until recently I could work around the hogging very simply – a safe boot followed by a normal boot – but that workaround is no longer effective.
No exotic use of KEXTs. I suspect that my current test set of data (a few thousand files, a little over 1 GB) is simply too much for the current build of the OS with my hardware.
MacBookPro8,2 with 4 GB memory, booted from a hard disk drive limited to USB 2.0.
Screen shots fromFriday Thursday 14th July:
Postscript, 2016-07-22: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/23152707
Without safe mode: kernel_task hogs the CPUs so much, from the outset, that most things are close to a standstill. Until recently I could work around the hogging very simply – a safe boot followed by a normal boot – but that workaround is no longer effective.
No exotic use of KEXTs. I suspect that my current test set of data (a few thousand files, a little over 1 GB) is simply too much for the current build of the OS with my hardware.
MacBookPro8,2 with 4 GB memory, booted from a hard disk drive limited to USB 2.0.
Screen shots from
Postscript, 2016-07-22: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/23152707
Last edited:
I installed Sierra on another partition on my rMB early 2015, and also noticed significant battery usage compared with El Capitan on the same machine. And Sierra is only for testing purpose...
Last edited:
Same, I'm itching to install it the way I did the EL Capitan public beta, but also remember the inconvenience of certain apps not working or being unstable. I use iphone/ipad much more than my Macbook Pro, so I am definitely not going to install beta software on them again.
I still remember when my alarm stopped going off on my phone and I was late to work a few days in a row until I broke out an old alarm clock.
If you can't tell, I'm still on the fence because my inner geek want to be cutting edge, while the more responsible part of my brain is risk-adverse.
I still get that excessive hogging, but not from the outset. It begins some time after logging on.
No major issues for me. Wifi sometimes has to be switched off and on again after sleep, which is inconvenient.
Workload consists of Office, Webex, Omnigraffle, Filezilla a few terminal sessions and two memory and CPU hungy VM's taking, collectively 12Gb RAM and 6 (thread) cores (heavily loaded at times), with the VM's hosted from an external Samsung T1 SSD on a mid 2015 15 inch MBP.
At the end of my work day I can suspend these and the computer functions normally, apart from the aforementioned wifi issue. Seems stable to me.
Workload consists of Office, Webex, Omnigraffle, Filezilla a few terminal sessions and two memory and CPU hungy VM's taking, collectively 12Gb RAM and 6 (thread) cores (heavily loaded at times), with the VM's hosted from an external Samsung T1 SSD on a mid 2015 15 inch MBP.
At the end of my work day I can suspend these and the computer functions normally, apart from the aforementioned wifi issue. Seems stable to me.
I'm defragmenting the boot disk. Neither the catalog B-tree nor the attributes B-tree was fragmented, so I don't expect a significant improvement but still, I should do this before reviewing the hogging.
I'm using El Capitan and have to disable my wifi and enable my wifi at least 1 time per day when waking it from sleep. It's inconvienent on a beta...it's a waste of time on a polished product!
What's the model identifier of the Mac? You'll find it in System Information. There'll probably be an explanation for the problem but I'll need (at least) basic hardware information before steering to relevant topics.
I used iDefrag 4.x on OS X 10.9.5 to perform a full optimisation of the Sierra startup volume. Not the first time that I had done so, but today I allowed changes to the two B-trees (each one was rebuilt and then compacted). Whilst the map was on screen I removed a few noticeably large items, including a downloaded .zip file for Xcode and Apple's installer for the OS.
The next start and restart of Sierra were enormously improved, compared to all prior starts.
For the restart test I ran Activity Monitor, Console, Disk Utility, Finder, Firefox, OmniWeb, Safari, System Preferences and Terminal; and (as usual) I preferred to have applications restored. From the time of entering my FileVault 2 pass phrase, to the time when all nine windowed applications responded acceptably well: around ten minutes. Yes, that was an enormous improvement (bear in mind, the use of USB 2.0).
I created a new user, used fast user switching and left the Mac alone. Around two hours later I logged out, unlocked the screen of the first user and found that again, kernel_task was endlessly hogging the CPU (typically more than eighty percent). I neither took note of when the degradation began, nor attempted to determine the causes.
Whilst the current hogging might be as bad as before, the ill effects are marginally less noticeable. That margin is probably thanks to the two optimised B-trees.
Last edited:
As my experience with the first Sierra beta was nothing short of disastrous, and my El Cap setup is working pretty much perfectly (kiss of death !!) i'm going to stick with it until after the public Gold release has happened and been well tested and reported.
!!) i'm going to stick with it until after the public Gold release has happened and been well tested and reported.
You don't defrag Mac OS X.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac/how-defrag-speed-up-mac-os-x-2016-3600241/
http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac/how-defrag-speed-up-mac-os-x-2016-3600241/
No need for assumptions
the test environment was outlined in https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/23128071 above.Technical
More than just defragmentation of unchanged data/metadata files.
For my most recent round of testing, I allowed significant changes to two large and essential metadata files: the catalog B-tree and the attributes B-tree. Such files are normally written very close to the start of the (HFS Plus) volume and:
- where the volume is on rotational media, that closeness goes towards optimal performance
- with or without rotational media, contiguity of both files goes towards optimal performance.
For this round, I allowed iDefrag to make the required changes to those two files.
When I last checked, iDefrag 4.x made use of fsck_hfs(8) for each rebuild. One rebuild (option -R) with flag a, another rebuild with flag c.
A recent view of the layout, showing an attributes file that is relatively small (less than 1 GB):
From that article it seems to me that Lewis Painter lacks some breadth and depth of experience.
Less technically
For pre-release Sierra, I'm performing very lightweight tests in an unusually constrained environment.
In the past, I more often performed heavyweight tests in a good or better-than-average environment.
Either way: there's likelihood of reproducibly exposing a symptom (maybe a bug) that might never be found with, say, an all-SSD environment.
The greater the exposure before release of the operating system, the easier it should be for Apple to address issues in good time.
Last edited:
Some time before the most recent update, my setup drifted back into hogging the CPU. Neither an update, nor a safe boot, worked around the problem.
Critically: I can't get the redesigned Console to present what's required, so it's unnecessarily difficult for me to attempt diagnoses.
All things considered, I'm shelving the pre-release. I might start it occasionally if I learn that updates are available, and I'll probably start it after a release is distributed, but for now: testing is far from worthwhile.
From the little that I read in https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/macos-sierra-10-12-beta.195/ it does seem that most users are reasonably pleased. I hope that other users don't find kernel_task hogging the CPU after the OS is released.
Critically: I can't get the redesigned Console to present what's required, so it's unnecessarily difficult for me to attempt diagnoses.
All things considered, I'm shelving the pre-release. I might start it occasionally if I learn that updates are available, and I'll probably start it after a release is distributed, but for now: testing is far from worthwhile.
From the little that I read in https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/macos-sierra-10-12-beta.195/ it does seem that most users are reasonably pleased. I hope that other users don't find kernel_task hogging the CPU after the OS is released.