Leopard and Youtube On Less Than 1Gb RAM

[Dronecatcher]

I've finally installed mps-tube, a command line Youtube browser, after following advice in this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/anyone-using-lubuntu-16-04.2150162/

To get it working I did a fresh install of Leopard on my 12" 1.33GHz Powerbook that was previously running Tiger and have been amazed at it's performance - especially as it only has 768Mb RAM.

Apart from the great performance of mps-youtube, old favourites SMTube, Coreplayer and MPlayer, the ability of Leopard Webkit on this little machine is incredible - as you can see in my latest video, fluid Youtube at 63% CPU is quite something in 2018.

 

[nglevin]

Semi-related; the two best tweaks for Leopard performance are to turn off Secure Virtual Memory (Leopard's last update will automatically turn it on) if you have anything less than an SSD or a 10,000 rpm HDD, and disable Dashboard from the Terminal because it's typically wasting your RAM with a full blown web browser engine that you're not using.

Never had any problems with Leopard's performance with those two bits alone.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Semi-related; the two best tweaks for Leopard performance are to turn off Secure Virtual Memory (Leopard's last update will automatically turn it on) if you have anything less than an SSD or a 10,000 rpm HDD, and disable Dashboard from the Terminal because it's typically wasting your RAM with a full blown web browser engine that you're not using.

Never had any problems with Leopard's performance with those two bits alone.

Dashboard is off on all my OSX installs, and Leopard gets all eye candy turned off and drop shadows on G4s. Tell me more about Secure Virtual Memory though - never heard of that.

EDIT: Everything I've read says there's virtually no performance increase by disabling it - but a huge security risk.

 

[nglevin]

Well, professionally, I can't tell you to do anything that compromises security. So, no, I can't advance that conversation much further than that, at that level.

I will say that disabling "Secure Virtual Memory" puts the state of Mac OS X's security somewhere around 10.3, far beneath Windows Vista, and noticeably makes my PowerBook G4 with a 4200rpm HDD more sluggish every time that it's on. Turning it on my late 2006 C2D MBP with a 7200rpm HDD didn't introduce much slowdown.

It's all a bit moot on some level because these old operating systems have security issues that will never be patched, and shouldn't be on the internet to begin with. But then, why say that in a topic about getting your G4 watching YouTube on the Internet?

 

[Dronecatcher]

It's all a bit moot on some level because these old operating systems have security issues that will never be patched, and shouldn't be on the internet to begin with. But then, why say that in a topic about getting your G4 watching YouTube on the Internet?

I'd turn it off in a flash if I thought there'd be a performance gain - but online says no...I'll do some tests myself later.

 

[Raging Dufus]

... and disable Dashboard from the Terminal because it's typically wasting your RAM with a full blown web browser engine that you're not using.

I'm one of those rare few that actually use and enjoy Dashboard, but when I'm not using it I disable it with DashQuit. I can then bring it back with a click on the Dashboard icon whenever I want.

 

[wicknix]

You forgot the the most lightweight option that requires no extra software (other than QuickTime 7.7). TenFiveTube!
FYI: You can maximize its window for a bigger playback window that shows a related videos side bar and comments section.

Cheers

 

[Dronecatcher]

You forgot the the most lightweight option that requires no extra software (other than QuickTime 7.7). TenFiveTube!
FYI: You can maximize its window for a bigger playback window that shows a related videos side bar and comments section.

Cheers

Yes, it edges out Webkit by a couple of percent but when I did the video it kept glitching on me - screen going blank - maybe a bug with the Powerbook's GPU?

 

[amagichnich]

Well, professionally, I can't tell you to do anything that compromises security. So, no, I can't advance that conversation much further than that, at that level.

I will say that disabling "Secure Virtual Memory" puts the state of Mac OS X's security somewhere around 10.3, far beneath Windows Vista, and noticeably makes my PowerBook G4 with a 4200rpm HDD more sluggish every time that it's on. Turning it on my late 2006 C2D MBP with a 7200rpm HDD didn't introduce much slowdown.

It's all a bit moot on some level because these old operating systems have security issues that will never be patched, and shouldn't be on the internet to begin with. But then, why say that in a topic about getting your G4 watching YouTube on the Internet?

Posting this from the 1Ghz TiBook with 10.5.8 installed. The impact of secure virtual memory is not not really existent. In a benchmark you can see a difference but it's too little to actually matter.
I chose my slowest Leopard running machine to show this. I suspect on faster machines the effect is even less.

Bigger difference though is 10.5.8 vs 10.4.11

EDIT: Fans are escalating BUT I can watch Youtube in plain Leopard Webkit!

 

[Dronecatcher]

Bigger difference though is 10.5.8 vs 10.4.11

There's going to be a big hit on the TiBook there as Leopard is passing some of it's GPU load to the CPU.

 

[nglevin]

Yes, Core Image on Leopard has a great software renderer (and with that, an incomplete software-only OpenGL implementation) as a fallback for GPU based rendering, which didn't exist on Tiger.

That's going to make Leopard look bad in benchmarks on hardware that lacks a Quartz Extreme-capable GPU, even though it's... substantially better in many ways.

As for the benchmarks, it's hard to read what the scores really mean (i.e., would be nice to see randomized writes, seek times, averages as a breakdown), but you did try that out on a 4200rpm hard drive, which is excellent.

In that case, yeah, best to keep it on. And "fix" any performance regression from secure virtual memory with hardware! Faster HDD or Solid State.

 

[amagichnich]

As for the benchmarks, it's hard to read what the scores really mean (i.e., would be nice to see randomized writes, seek times, averages as a breakdown), but you did try that out on a 4200rpm hard drive, which is excellent.

Better? As said before there are nearly no differences between secure virtual memory on and off

 

[nglevin]

Thanks! Uncached random read with 256K blocks happens to be the only one of the disk tests that sees a noticeable drop, and the system memory tests that aren't leaning on Altivec extensions all regress, which makes sense.

The CPU tests also see some interesting regressions, but that might also come down to memory usage.

 

[amagichnich]

Thanks! Uncached random read with 256K blocks happens to be the only one of the disk tests that sees a noticeable drop, and the system memory tests that aren't leaning on Altivec extensions all regress, which makes sense.

The CPU tests also see some interesting regressions, but that might also come down to memory usage.

Youre welcome
To be more precise with my "As said before there are nearly no differences between secure virtual memory on and off" - even though some of the numbers look like much of a difference, in real-world usage I dont't feel any

 

[Lastic]

I've finally installed mps-tube, a command line Youtube browser, after following advice in this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/anyone-using-lubuntu-16-04.2150162/

To get it working I did a fresh install of Leopard on my 12" 1.33GHz Powerbook that was previously running Tiger and have been amazed at it's performance - especially as it only has 768Mb RAM.

Apart from the great performance of mps-youtube, old favourites SMTube, Coreplayer and MPlayer, the ability of Leopard Webkit on this little machine is incredible - as you can see in my latest video, fluid Youtube at 63% CPU is quite something in 2018.

Aha, after following the related threads I saw that you installed pip3 via TigerBrew on Leopard.

Will have to upgrade my Leopard system pip3.4 since it cannot install or update due to TLSv1 no longer being supported.
And offcourse Macports pip3.6 is a no-go.