how to make OS X pleasant on an iBook?

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
My foray into the Mac (OS X) world is starting to get quite frustrating, and am starting to seriously think about switching back to Windows.

I bought a new iBook a couple of months ago at the Jaguar launch event, and have optimized what I thought was already a pretty decent hardware configuration (G3 700 Mhz 256 MB RAM, with Radeon graphics) for maximum performance: maxed out RAM at 640 MB, and updated the OS to 10.2.1.

Despite all of that, I am still not satified with my machine's performance. The fact that I have a lowly PC (PII 266 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, ATI Rage 128 16MB) that I can use as a benchmark for performance judgements probably doesn't help.

I was especially disappointed at the fact that maxing out the memory didn't make an appreciable difference. Sure some apps opened faster, pageouts were fewer, I could open more apps at the same time without hitting the disk. But:

- I am still getting pageouts with as few apps open as the following: Mail, IE, Acrobat Reader, Terminal, iCal, LimeWire, Stickies, MemoryStick, iTunes, CPU Monitor. I just don't understand how so much memory can get eaten up so quickly! I believe I understand the factors involved in OS X's memory usage well (thanks in big part to John Siracusa's articles) and have done considerable troubleshooting, with Quartz Debug, the Terminal (top, vm_stat), MemoryStick, SystemManager and the mostly useless and unreliable Process Viewer (which can only show percentages.. come on Apple!). Btw memory monitoring remains a huge sore spot in OS X, especially compared to Windows Task Manager's Processes and Performance view. I wish I could order processes by memory usage in 'top'.. *sigh*

Some processes also seem to take an enormous amount of memory for themselves. Examples (from top):



PhysMem: 67.0M wired, 371M active, 172M inactive, 610M used, 30.0M free

VM: 2.57G + 69.1M 18474(18474) pageins, 15985(15985) pageouts



PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE

179 Window Man 0.0% 36:16.18 2 274 886 7.95M 39.8M 36.4M 118M

390 SystemUISe 0.0% 2:56.51 4 163 891 167M 5.38M 170M 234M

16982 Internet E 0.0% 23:22.30 7 89 325 31.0M 20.1M 24.1M 113M

19687 iCal 0.0% 2:51.88 1 65 438 74.1M 12.7M 82.8M 137M

21522 LimeWire 0.0% 15:05.13 36 332 511 51.9M 12.0M 45.5M 311M





So what's going here? What's with iCal using an incredible 70 MB. It's only a calendaring app, not an application server! And all that for truly terrible performance.. high memory usage, sluggish GUI, anybody else sees a resemblance here? Java app anybody (check out LimeWire for an example)? Come on Apple, not only your CPUs are lagging, your OS is lagging but now your apps are slow too!!



memory leaks? inefficient memory usage, badly written applications? am I going to be forced to logout or worse restart to clean up my memory?? my current uptime is only 2 days for God's sake!



So my question to you satisfied iBook/OS X users is: am I doing something wrong here? is there a way to make one's experience of OS X on an iBook pleasant or at least satisyfing *now*? or is OS X just not there yet in terms of performance? can we hope that it'll be there before Apple's dwindling market share makes it irrelevant?
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 35
    Well on my lowly 500/66/8mb vram iBook, I've found that reducing the colors to thousands, setting the font smoothing to Standard, and set the minumum font size for smoothing to the highest value, and things seem to run smoothly.

    Limewire is crap, dont use it. iCal seems to be a little inconsistent, I'd recommend reinstalling it. In fact, if you don't have anything important on the machine at the moment, you might do well to just do a clean reinstall of the system. When I installed Jaguar on this i did an upgrade first, and the perfromance sucked. So I did a clean reinstall and it runs great. Also make sure that you're using the most recent versions of the apps, I know IE has had an update which makes it run better, also iTunes as well.



    Updating prebindings can help a lot too with app launching, especially with the iBook since it has a slow hard drive. Go into the Terminal application in Utilities and type



    sudo update_prebinding -root /



    Then log out and back in and it should be faster.



    [ 09-29-2002: Message edited by: hotboxd ]</p>
  • Reply 2 of 35
    addisonaddison Posts: 1,185member
    The GUI is slow, so the impression is that the whole OS is slow which it isn't. Just try encoding an MP3 file for example and you will get a better idea of performance.



    I don't think anyone can really understand why OS X has such a sluggish GUI, OS9 was as fast as Windows, the problem is not the hardware.



    I for one think that OS X is still an advanced beta, they still haven't released a lot of APIs and that means that they don't feel that they can because they are likely to change i.e. Apple doesn't think OS X is finished enough yet. That being the case I expect further improvements in performance with optomisation.
  • Reply 3 of 35
    kecksykecksy Posts: 1,002member
    The probelm is OS X GUI is many times more processor intensive than Windows of OS 9. Drop shadows, traparency, antialiasing, icon scaling, vector transformations, live resizing. They all eat processor cycles.



    Oh and no matter how much memory you have, OS X will still page out. Why? All programs in OS X use virtual memory. This is normal in Unix. Having more RAM just meens your programs won't pageout as often.
  • Reply 4 of 35
    well ie just recently got a Ti800 and im pleased to say its faster than any machine ive used and this includes my neighboiurs brand new XP thing. Also Im the only one in the dorm with working net access haahah 2 steps to set it up

    1.type in an address here

    2.open a browser and see if it worked haah

    they have like 30/40 steps and no one seems to be able to get it working bwahah. Err and I'd say you were running quite alot there really, i mena for a start limewire is java so thats bound to have a performance hit then ical is pretty much beta, both are known to be pretty sluggish, try running some things that are actually known to be well made likei curretly have:

    mail, chimera, msn,icq,adium,itunes,preview,cpu mon,freehand,illustrator open and its still lightening fast
  • Reply 5 of 35
    if LimeWire is crap, then what are (free) alternatives on Mac OS X?
  • Reply 6 of 35
    newnew Posts: 3,244member
    acquisition
  • Reply 7 of 35
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    cygsid, I don't know what to tell you... I run 10.2.1 on a 350MHz Pismo with 384MB RAM... and it's fine.



    It's not *stellar*, but it's fine. I certainly don't seem to have the issues you do, and on lesser hardware even.
  • Reply 8 of 35
    spartspart Posts: 2,060member
    <a href="http://www.xlife.org/aquisition.php"; target="_blank">Acquisition Linkage</a>. I guess that means I vote for it as well...Limewire is horrendous.



    Also...iCal is one of the slowest Mac OS X apps ever...I wouldn't benchmark it against anything in its current state. It's slow on a Dual 1.25 I would bet, though it is certianly not the fault of the OS.
  • Reply 9 of 35
    [quote]Originally posted by sushiism:

    <strong>well ie just recently got a Ti800 and im pleased to say its faster than any machine ive used and this includes my neighboiurs brand new XP thing. Also Im the only one in the dorm with working net access haahah 2 steps to set it up

    1.type in an address here

    2.open a browser and see if it worked haah

    they have like 30/40 steps and no one seems to be able to get it working bwahah. Err and I'd say you were running quite alot there really, i mena for a start limewire is java so thats bound to have a performance hit then ical is pretty much beta, both are known to be pretty sluggish, try running some things that are actually known to be well made likei curretly have:

    mail, chimera, msn,icq,adium,itunes,preview,cpu mon,freehand,illustrator open and its still lightening fast</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Yep!

    I have a TiBook and with OSX.2 it works just perfect, really is great...





    HOWEVER:

    When I orginally installed Jaguar it really suxed! I just archived and installed!!! And it really worked slow and shitty! Then one day I had nothing better to do so I made a few backups on my iMac G4 and did a clean install and now it KICKS ASS! My TiBook is fine





    For the iBook ppl! I have OSX.2 installed on my G4 400 and it works really well! Perhaps you just need to reinstall it and give it a whirl! Dont go back to XP because it truely is Shit! And truley isnt better than damm OSX
  • Reply 10 of 35
    Hey, I have the upgrade cds for OS 10.2, so i am not sure how to do a clean install on my iBook to get awesome performance. Should I post this somewhere else?
  • Reply 11 of 35
    thanks for the suggestions, all.



    however regarding the clean install option, I don't think I am gonna try that until I see a rational scientific explanation of why that should make things run faster. I just can't fathom why that would make a difference. Apple Support says nothing about that either. I mean, after all, this is no a pretty expensive thing to do in terms of time especially. And I thought the whole point of buying a Mac was not to have to reinstall the OS every so often. In any case I am not even sure I have that option on my Jaguar installation CD since they came with the machine (which had OS X 10.1 originally). I'll have to check. If Apple doesn't even provide the option to new some of their customers, I have a hard time believing that would make a difference. But that's just me: I don't like doing things without understanding them.
  • Reply 12 of 35
    [quote]Originally posted by Spart:

    <strong><a href="http://www.xlife.org/aquisition.php"; target="_blank">Acquisition Linkage</a>. I guess that means I vote for it as well...Limewire is horrendous.



    Also...iCal is one of the slowest Mac OS X apps ever...I wouldn't benchmark it against anything in its current state. It's slow on a Dual 1.25 I would bet, though it is certianly not the fault of the OS.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    thanks for the link! Seems much better than LimeWire indeed. Very nice tidy Aqua UI in particular. I am starting to like this new class of OS X apps that take advantage of Aqua features like toolbars, slide sheets, and drawers: consistent and user-friendly, though a little pokey.

    The result sets unfortunately seem poorer than LimeWire's, which were already much smaller than Morpheus' on WIndows. Is it the whole P2P market dying out or just the state of P2P on the Mac?
  • Reply 13 of 35
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    [quote]Originally posted by cygsid:

    <strong>

    however regarding the clean install option, I don't think I am gonna try that until I see a rational scientific explanation of why that should make things run faster. I just can't fathom why that would make a difference. Apple Support says nothing about that either. I mean, after all, this is no a pretty expensive thing to do in terms of time especially. And I thought the whole point of buying a Mac was not to have to reinstall the OS every so often. In any case I am not even sure I have that option on my Jaguar installation CD since they came with the machine (which had OS X 10.1 originally). I'll have to check. If Apple doesn't even provide the option to new some of their customers, I have a hard time believing that would make a difference. But that's just me: I don't like doing things without understanding them.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    The main advantage to a clean install appears to be that the hard drive is optimized (the hard way, but still...), and there's no chance of a few munged preference files lurking around.



    You don't have to wipe the HD to install (or reinstall) the OS on a Mac, but that doesn't mean there's no difference if you do. I've wiped and reinstalled for most major system releases, just to clean things out.



    Until the likes of DiskWarrior are OS X native (and OS X-booting CDs become common) it's probably the least painful way to install Jaguar optimally.



    As far as P2P software goes, my impression has been that it's generally less polished and more problematic on the Mac side, for whatever reasons.



    [ 09-29-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
  • Reply 14 of 35
    serranoserrano Posts: 1,806member
    Limewire? Sick. Get Aquisition or Neo, or both.
  • Reply 15 of 35
    if you're really concerned with speed, you need to do a clean install. back up your stuff and get cracking.



    it makes a huge difference. i did a clean install on a brand new machine, that had been updated from 10.1 to 10.2, nothing else had ever been installed on it, and there's no way that the HD was fragmented.



    it makes a big difference. if speed is a concern, you need to do this.
  • Reply 16 of 35
    It' s funny, but a clean install powered up my system tremendously. Even though the former install wasn't old. I just had HD problems.

    So my advice is: Clean install, partitioning Os 9 and OS X . Makes things a lot smoother..

    Windows will always appear slicker, as OS X on your machine, but actual processing is fast on your iBook. OS X GUI is nice, but only works perfectly fast from new DP machines (my impression). But you should be okay after the clean install (time after time use system optimizer, shareware)



    [ 09-30-2002: Message edited by: antaisce ]</p>
  • Reply 17 of 35
    stoostoo Posts: 1,490member
    Can you run the Mac OS 8 or 9 Finder as a Classic app? Can you quit the Aqua-Finder?
  • Reply 18 of 35
    not really.
  • Reply 19 of 35
    [quote]Originally posted by cygsid:

    <strong>



    thanks for the link! Seems much better than LimeWire indeed. Very nice tidy Aqua UI in particular. I am starting to like this new class of OS X apps that take advantage of Aqua features like toolbars, slide sheets, and drawers: consistent and user-friendly, though a little pokey.

    The result sets unfortunately seem poorer than LimeWire's, which were already much smaller than Morpheus' on WIndows. Is it the whole P2P market dying out or just the state of P2P on the Mac?</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Neo might have better results.



    I think P2P on the mac isn't as strong because there isn't any spyware to put money into the development of P2P software. In some ways, that's good, and in some ways that's bad.



    It's great that we dont' have to put up with spyware and adware, but the developers of P2P software are hobbyists who don't always have too much time to spend on the software.



    I don't really use P2P things anyway, but I can understand how it would be frustrating.
  • Reply 20 of 35
    I have a 333mhz G3 Bronze keyboard laptop. I had a old install of MacOS 10.1.5 on the standard 4gb harddrive. My dad got a new TiBook 450mhz G4 with a 10gb harddrive. He got a new 40gb in the TiBook and I got his old 10gb. I slapped that drive inside and booted up with the G4 optimized version of MacOS 10.1.5. Talk about SLOW!!! So I formated into two partition (a 2gb and an 8gb partitition), one for MacOS 9 and one for MacOS X. I did a clean install of MacOS 9 and updated to 9.2.2, then installed MacOS 10.1, and updated to MacOS 10.1.5 without installing any additional software then updated to MacOS 10.2. Talk about a definite speed bump from a clean install. Anyone who finds MacOS 10.2 slow needs to do this. Also update your prebindings at least once a month. One program NOT to run is anything dealing with Symantic. They slow down the computer and end up screwing stuff up.
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