New iMac 24' Performance, Snow Leopard
I'm very pleased with my purchase (about a week ago) and I don't regret spending 2 grand now than waiting for the iMac upgrade due in November. But I do have one question...why do I feel it's faster when I boot it at times than others? Like right now I booted Safari, iPhoto, and iTunes and they took one bounce each to load? The average for those applications is 2 tops plus a bit more to load (iTunes, iPhoto) and when I started widgets it was like a second to start and load all applications when it's usually 2-3 seconds...what gives? Why is my mac super fast on certain days?
Also, I was wondering if leopard takes full of advantage of the dual processors of my computer. I've read that Snow Leopard will be more of a performance upgrade, so I wondered if my mac could possibly get a boost from new software...or is my current OS taking full advantage of the Core 2 Duo?
Also, I was wondering if leopard takes full of advantage of the dual processors of my computer. I've read that Snow Leopard will be more of a performance upgrade, so I wondered if my mac could possibly get a boost from new software...or is my current OS taking full advantage of the Core 2 Duo?
Comments
Sometimes the VM caches can get a bit slow depending on what you are running. If for example, you run Photoshop for a while and edit loads of files and then try to switch and launch say Indesign, it will take longer than if you had tried to launch Indesign from a freshly booted system as the OS tries to free up resources to give to the frontmost app.
A difference of a few seconds is normal.
Also, I was wondering if leopard takes full of advantage of the dual processors of my computer. I've read that Snow Leopard will be more of a performance upgrade, so I wondered if my mac could possibly get a boost from new software...or is my current OS taking full advantage of the Core 2 Duo?
Snow Leopard should give some performance boost but launch performance isn't so much a CPU factor as disk factor. The apps have to load the files required into your Ram. What would help more is a faster disk - at least one with a higher read performance.
SSD is one such type of disk and the launch times are usually 30-100% faster than a platter drive. Like I say though, apps will be cached no matter what you do so you will probably always see a slight variation in launch performance.
If you have enough Ram and you don't turn off your machine, you could try using a Ram disk. There are programs like this:
http://www.clarkwood.com/old/rambunctious/
or you can do it in the command-line:
http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/23/creat...k-in-mac-os-x/
You can then launch apps from the Ram disk - someone said about using it as a Photoshop scratch. You'd have to have over 2GB Ram to be able to use this effectively.
The problem is you lose the contents of the Ram disk on reboot so you'd be as well opening apps and just leaving them open.