Delay
I just installed virtual pc 6 with windows 2000 and was playing around with it a little. Enjoyed it a lot actually :P
Anyway when I switched out of it back into panther, everything felt a lot SLOWER. Not everything actually, but just the program load times. I'd noticed this the first time I switched, and now, when I used windows, even in a virtual machine it still had faster program load times. I'm not just talking IE loading faster cause it's part of the OS, but outlook express, word, and just about everything else I tried. I mean, I just closed mail and opened it again. Had to wait for FIVE bounces and then a little before the window actually popped up. I counted ONE SECOND for outlook express to load. Safari, despite having been tweaked for speed, still takes 4 bounces to fully load. Nothing but the most miniscule programs and the terminal take less than 2 or 3 bounces to load.
This just made me curious. I know it isn't important how long programs take to load, as once you've loaded them you won't have to do so again for a while. But it just seems like such a strange thing. I last experienced delays of this nature on my 200mhz PII that I ran 6 years ago. We shouldn't have to be at this level. Is there some inherent limitation in the OS X design that programs can't load fast? Windows has been doing it for ages and I don't see why we shouldn't get it too. I know the heavy interface stuff will slow things down slightly but these delays happen even before the interface loads, so that can't be it.
Please keep in mind that I am not dissing mac os. I love mac os and love my brand new 15inch AlBook but it just seems so weird.
Does anyone have any ideas why this happens?
Anyway when I switched out of it back into panther, everything felt a lot SLOWER. Not everything actually, but just the program load times. I'd noticed this the first time I switched, and now, when I used windows, even in a virtual machine it still had faster program load times. I'm not just talking IE loading faster cause it's part of the OS, but outlook express, word, and just about everything else I tried. I mean, I just closed mail and opened it again. Had to wait for FIVE bounces and then a little before the window actually popped up. I counted ONE SECOND for outlook express to load. Safari, despite having been tweaked for speed, still takes 4 bounces to fully load. Nothing but the most miniscule programs and the terminal take less than 2 or 3 bounces to load.
This just made me curious. I know it isn't important how long programs take to load, as once you've loaded them you won't have to do so again for a while. But it just seems like such a strange thing. I last experienced delays of this nature on my 200mhz PII that I ran 6 years ago. We shouldn't have to be at this level. Is there some inherent limitation in the OS X design that programs can't load fast? Windows has been doing it for ages and I don't see why we shouldn't get it too. I know the heavy interface stuff will slow things down slightly but these delays happen even before the interface loads, so that can't be it.
Please keep in mind that I am not dissing mac os. I love mac os and love my brand new 15inch AlBook but it just seems so weird.
Does anyone have any ideas why this happens?
Comments
Two questions: how much RAM does your Mac have and how much memory had you allocated to the virtual Windows 2000 machine from within Virtual PC?
my comp has 512 and I had allocated 256 to vpc but the same thing happens without vpc... ical for example takes ages to load and so does iphoto... I also have the 1.25ghz g4... but I've noticed slower loading times on most macs I've tried
We touch on all the possibilities!
Originally posted by Aquatic
Get more RAM.
You know, replies of such really are of absolutely no help. You'd be better off not posting at all.
Read his post carefully. Don't just post for the sake of posting
It's very annoying
He asked a simple question:
Why do Windows apps launch so much quicker than Mac apps?
I don't have a solid answer myself. Frankly, though, I've found launching apps on Mac OS X on my three and a half year old Mac to be just as fast as launching some apps on my roommates two year old PC. I know that, surprisingly, I can actually open Safari faster than he can Internet Explorer. Mail loads about the same time as Outlook.
One big difference between how apps are used on a Mac, however, may make up for the delay in app launching.
I think you'll find, pumpkin, that one of the big UI differences between Mac apps and Windows apps is that the Windows apps usually are tied in directly to the document. The document is the app. Close the document and the app is gone; you can't keep an app open without keeping the document open. This means that Windows is going to have to be pretty fast at launching apps because every time you close and open documents, you're exiting and relaunching apps. Take Internet Explorer for example. Close the page you're browsing and IE is completely gone.
Almost all Mac apps, however, have a global menu bar that stays open after you close all documents of an app. The app stays running and in memory, typically using 0% CPU, and stays there until you explicitly tell it to close. This means that Mac users, on average, will be launching apps far less frequently than Windows users. Thus, there isn't as great a need to make the app launch time lightning fast. Though, in my own experience at least, it isn't exactly "sluggish" compared to Windows.
Another feature in Mac OS X is that parts of apps are kept cached in memory after they are closed. This accounts for part of why Mac OS X almost never has any "free" memory -- it caches as much as possible, but when it needs memory for something new, it drops that cache. This caching makes launching apps a second or third time faster than launching them the first time. This also accounts for why apps seemed to launch so slowly after you were running Virtual PC. Virtual PC used up a sizable chunk of your memory, eating the cache of any other apps.
This is why Aquatic said Get more RAM. This is actually very sound advice. On Mac OS X, you can never really have too much RAM. The system will happily gobble up every bit you give it to cache extra data for quick retrieval and to pad the window manager.
Of course, this doesn't directly explain why launching apps, for you, is noticeably slower on the Mac than the Windows PC. Hopefully someone else will have some sound advice or insight into that.
Hope this helps.
THere are however, apps like photoshop on windows that do not follow the windows system (presumably because they wolud take a long time to load and would not be practical when you close a file to open another one)
Pumpkin, try out apps like photoshop or stuff that do not follow the common windowing technique. I'm pretty sure it's about the same if not more.
STeve.