'Slow Software' - A Simple Request...

davegee

I often read people who post stuff (like the new iCal) as being S-L-O-W.



If you could PLEASE report what type/speed machine you are using (and maybe memory too).



For example:



I don't find iCal slow (G4/450/768MB) and I don't understand why others do. Could it be something wrong with their machine or install or could be be they are using an iMac 333Mhz machine with 128MB of memory. Gee I dunno because the person who posted the message never said.



Dave

torifile

I don't find iCal slow on my Ti (667, 512ram).



Good luck in your crusade. People are really bad about complaining when they're not completely happy. It wouldn't make sense to complain if the slowness is b/c they've got a slow machine, so they just leave that part out.

surfrat

iCal is A-Okay on my PowerMac (400MHz, 512MB).

hmurchison

Good as long as it's not slow on relatively current machines I won't worry too much.

sizzle chest

Remember when OSX first came out?



You'd have one person posting "I can't believe this -- X is dead-ass slow on my brand new Powermac with 1.5GB ram! This suxx!"



Another person would say "I don't get all the complaints about speed -- OSX is more than fast enough on my iMac 333 with 256MB ram. I love it"



And back and forth and back and forth...



The fact is, the difference in perception between one person and another, the difference between what's "fast enough" or "responsive," is greater than the difference between one guy's hardware and another's.



If somebody on here posts "Argh, iCal is unusable on my brand new dual 1ghz" it doesn't mean anything to me unless I see a consensus among many users and varied hardware. In other words, almost everybody said Virtual PC 5 for OSX was slow and it made me hesitate to buy it (and keep using VPC 3 under oS9) even though I had a use for it. I saw very few people say it was fast enough, and virtually everybody conceded it was slower than the previous OS8/9 versions of VPC.



But several apps -- Adobe Illustrator 10, iPhoto, Dreamweaver MX -- have such widely varying testimonials about speed, that it's impossible to know what to think.

harald

I found it INCREDIBLY slow on a QS 867 640MB.



I mean it -- 10 seconds to open a new event window, 5-6 seconds to change view from month / week / day.



Then I purged the last 5 years of my digital life from my imported Palm file and it sped up hugely.

sizzle chest

Outlook is the same way, Harald -- if you have too much old, unarchived stuff it bogs way down. If you clear out your inbox/sent items/deleted items, and your old calendar stuff, if speeds up by 2x or more.

steve

iCal works pretty efficiently on my 466MHz G4 with 384MB RAM. Not too slow, not too fast. Entirely tolerable, though.

ghost_user_name

Eh, it works "so-so" here on my dual 500.



All operations that I've tested go at a tolerable speed, but that's *tolerable*, not Snappy? or whatever the latest cliché is. Launch time is slow, taking between 10-12 seconds. Other tasks like creating events and switching calendar months distinctly show a visible lag. Remember on Mac OS X Public Beta how almost every UI interaction induced a brief lag, almost enough to think that you "mis-clicked" or something? It feels like that a lot.



<img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />

ghost_user_name

In addition on that last post of mine:



Launch time is now actually 3-4 seconds every time, yes, even on the first launch. It seems all my Mac needed way a swift restart to clear up that speed bug. Strange. Regardless, other app performance is still just the same, though.

logan cale

Very fast on my 800 MHz PowerBook.

fluffy

Speed is also a very relative thing. I'm not talking about person to person, but app to app. I don't expect some programs to be fast. I don't expect Maya to be snappy. But this is a calendar. That's all it is! There is absolutely NO reason for it to be anything less than instantaneous on my Dual 800, and yet it lags. I click... and click again... and a second later it updates. This application is not doing anything special, nothing that wasn't done by calendar apps on an 8 MHz SE, and yet it is SLOWER! It may not be System-7-on-a-Plus slow, but any speed hit at all on this type of program is unacceptable.

fluffy

[ 09-10-2002: Message edited by: Fluffy ]</p>

nebagakid

Maybe there could be some program that tests these things so we could have a global standard?



Also, iCal is good, <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />

steve

[quote]Originally posted by Fluffy:

<strong>There is absolutely NO reason for it to be anything less than instantaneous on my Dual 800, and yet it lags. I click... and click again... and a second later it updates. This application is not doing anything special, nothing that wasn't done by calendar apps on an 8 MHz SE, and yet it is SLOWER! It may not be System-7-on-a-Plus slow, but any speed hit at all on this type of program is unacceptable.</strong><hr></blockquote>



I'm going to be blunt: there is no f'ing way that iCal is slow on your system. Don't even start. It's tolerable on my SINGLE-PROCESSOR 466MHz Power Mac. You must have, like, 64MB of RAM or something, I dunno. I can't imagine it getting all that faster than what I have right now. Like you said, it's a Calendar app, there's not exactly a whole lot you can do with it; it's not like you want to keep the little slide-out cal insert on the left side-bar above 150 frames per second at all times. How do you measure instantaneousness? Microseconds? I click, it goes. There are far worse things that could still be improved--the window resizing in brushed metal apps, the typing in Navigator, etc.



Complaining about the speed of iCal on a dual 800 makes me question whether or not you're a troll wearing a Mac shirt in disguise.

ghost_user_name

It doesn't take a genius like Einstein to realize that:

speed is relative.



Some people will forever complain that their computers aren't fast enough. Such is life.



- plink plink -

fluffy

Speed is definately lacking on my machine: switching weeks in iCal takes a full second, and bringing up the event listing also takes a full second. Granted, this is because I have about a hundred events scheduled, but a slowdown of that magnitude was unexpected and unwelcome for such a small dataset. More distressing are the obvious bugs and deficiencies that make the app seem slower than it really is. The lack of a scrollbar in the left pane (Up and down arrow buttons? What?). The apparently random response of calendar elements to clicks and commands, constant interface bugs. no drag-and-drop, etc.



The issue, for me, is that iCal running on X makes the Mac look like crap.



In the past, the Mac never really looked like anything special. People would come and sit down at my system, and say "Oh, this is like Windows 3." But there was always more to the Mac experience than just what the desktop looked like. There was an attention to detail that just made the Mac better, and people that started working on a Mac slowly began to understand why: Quality. Now the Mac looks great, it just looks like it's better than anything else out there. But I'm afraid that when people really start using it they will realize that underneath all of the great looks, it's just another crappy *nix with the same poorly designed, hacked up apps and functionality that can be found on any linux distro. iCal extends and builds on that fear. It is not worthy of the Apple name.

xaqtly

iCal is fast on my iMac/800/768MB, and it's fast on my Power Mac DP 1 GHz (mirror face)/768 MB. No speed issues at all on either machine with iCal.

amorph

One thing to keep in mind with Cocoa apps: Since they're dynamic, clean, intuitive code is likely going to run slowly. Clean, intuitive code is much easier to fix than highly optimized code, all else being equal.



Unfortunately for early adopters, a 1.0 release is sort of the ultimate beta test, so you want the code to be in a fixable form.



So, you can more or less expect that 1.0 versions of Cocoa apps will be sluggish, then followed up with one or more bugfix updates, followed in turn by a performance tuned update.



The shorthand for this method among NeXTies is "make it work, then make it fast."



It goes double for applications that were clearly rushed out the door. Ideally, Apple wouldn't rush things out the door, but they're clearly trying hard to strike while the iron's hot - I can't get through this post without mixing at least one metaphor.



That's why I'm waiting for 10.2.1.



[ 09-11-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

nightfly

ical runs fine on my mac









wii