Making Operating Systems Faster

mbrowling writes "In an article over at kernelthread.com Amit Singh discusses 'Ten Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster'. The theme seems to be that since you won't run into 'earth-shattering algorithmic breakthroughs' in every OS releases, what're you gonna do to bump your performance numbers higher? Although the example used is OS X, the article points out that Windows uses the same approach."

#1 thing Apple should do...

...to make OS X faster is to stop having it render the GUI through Photoshop filters.

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

Same thing with XP... I get a much better performance if I shut off all the fancy transparency effects. Sure, they look cool.. but are they really necessary?

OS designers shoudl also cut down with bloatware and trying to 'integrate' everything into the OS...

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

I agree whole-heartedly. If Windows came installed 'Bare-Bones', there'd be a lot less annoyed people out there (but I'm sure we'd all miss Clippy)....however, that's one of the issues - who do you decide what should be an inherent part of the OS, and what shouldn't. Although you won't find anybody on slashdot propounding the beauty of having IE tied into Explorer, I know lots of AverageJoes who like the fact that they can just have that address bar on the TaskBar, and type a webaddress into it or a file path. Maybe "Where The Line Should Be Drawn" can be future Ask Slashdot article....

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

The problem, if Windows came "bare-bones", is that no one would buy it.

Why? Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems. People don't buy windows because it looks pretty, performs better, has the correct API set. They buy windows because it came on the computer they bought, and that's the computer that they know will run the software they have.

I'm sure there are some consumers who buy windows based on other criteria, but the vast majority of windows purchases are as a consequence of compatibility. If the actual statistics showed only 99% of retail windows purchases were as a result of pre-installation, that's about 0.999% less than I would have expected.

$.02

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

> What I don't want to see is them enabled/installed by default.

Let me guess, you don't sell OS's right? To move software, you have to have all the pretty stuff that makes it look nice ON by default. Because that's what the general population cares about. They'll look at it and say "Wow, that's ugly, what a crappy OS." ... and never buy it.

When it's pretty, *you* will say "Wow, that's pretty, but it's slowing it down, let me go into control panels, and registry settings, and god knows what else to tweak my settings while I overclock the damn thing and stick it in a freezer." Then you'll bitch about it on Slashdot. Which is exactly what's supposed to happen.

Because *they* don't know how to turn it on, and *you* do know how to turn it off. So the burden, by default, is on you. It sucks, but hey, what else is new?

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

When it's pretty, *you* will say "Wow, that's pretty, but it's slowing it down, let me go into control panels, and registry settings, and god knows what else to tweak my settings while I overclock the damn thing and stick it in a freezer." Then you'll bitch about it on Slashdot. Which is exactly what's supposed to happen.

There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.

Instead of clicking through a bunch of menus, finding the options, selecting radio buttons, etc, just disable it by default and ask at install/setup time "do you want the 'pretty version'? Be warned that it may affect system performance."

I think that eliminates the problems.

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

Something I like about KDE (and Gnome may do this too--I've just never used it) in this area over Windows is their performance/eye candy slider. You don't have to go through finding which settings are the eye candy and turning them off one by one. KDE has a slider that you can drag toward features or performance, and it shows below that the settings that are being turned on or off.

More uninformed opinion on Slashdot

There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.

What fucking hoops?

Right-click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings button.

Choose either "Best Performance" or "Best Appearance." Or check each option individually. What a non-issue.

If this was KDE, someone would have already answered with this, but because it's Windows, everyone just nods with the rest of the flock, "Baa, baa, yes, there are hoops to jump through, baa."

Speaking of KDE, talk about fucking hoops. You've got a completely horrible control center, with three different areas for changing the looks of things like window styles, widget styles, and so on. Why the hell isn't that all integrated into one configuration dialog? Oh, I forgot, ease-of-use is a criticism we only reserve for non-issues on the Windows platform like checking a radio button to get rid of a blue theme.

Re:More uninformed opinion on Slashdot

Don't forget the ever harder Right Click desktop->Properties->appearance->Windows Classic. It almost doubles the amount of time it takes to get windows xp running twice as fast.

The thing that drives me nuts is the constant harassment when you first install Windows XP for taking a tour and signing up for a .NET passport.

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

"Sure, they look cool.. but are they really necessary?"

Ugh I hate this question. "Is it really necessary?"... is the type of question you can ask if you really want to make anything go away. "Is a >500mhz processor really necessary? Is a color monitor really necessary? Is being connected to the net 24/7 really necessary? Is a color printer really necessary when B&W is cheaper?" Who really cares so long as you can choose?

I'll answer your question, though: The more your UI gives you, the better reflexes you can build while using your machine. Have you ever reacted to a screen refresh? (Particularly in the olden days when the CPU had to fight harder...) Ever notice change in window focus simply by spotting the change in titlebar color? Etc.

I have no problem with people turning the fancy stuff off to boost performance, but the "is it really necessary" argument does not apply. The question is really "Do I want it?"

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

Apple removed striping from everywhere in Panther. Quite a bit of it was replaced by brushed-metal. Even so, all it is doing is replacing one bitmap with another. The only possible gain is if they do not need to use alpha for transparency. Yet not all of this is by "removing" stuff. Quite a bit of tweaking is being done to speed up the OS, the most recent software update resulted in quite a few reports of faster system operation, and there was no discernable change in the featureset or operation of the UI.

The reason X runs slowly compared to Aqua is that Apple optimizes Aqua and allows harware acceleration (Quartz Extreme) and offloads lots of tasks to the GPU. I know of no X windowing system (aside from Apple's own implementation) that does this in OS X.

10.0 and 10.1 were dog-slow. Especially when you had a couple of hundred files in a folder. Jaguar was a huge increase in speed and performance. Quite a bit of that was due to the Quartz Extreme, but even my lowly 500MHz dual-USB iBook saw quite a boost from Jaguar and it was not able to use QE at all. Panther did very little to the iBook, except make it take forever to boot. I need to check on that bootcache issue.

My dual 800MHz Quicksilver is now almost three years old and I am still very happy with its performance. I expected to be wanting to replace it after two years, or after clock speeds have doubled, which is what I did when I used Wintel systems. Instead, I am considering keeping it around for the 10.4 release and at least another year or two. I attribute quite a bit of this to Apple's tweaks and performance enhancements of the OS.

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

They are fine so long as they remain optional. There are times when a transparent window has functionality beyond just looking cool. The ability to see what's printed in the window behind the one you're typing into is useful when reading a manual (in the form of on-line help or a web page), and using that manual to decide what to type into an editor or shell prompt. (This is the same reason I hate systems that force the keyboard focus window to always be the topmost window. Ever since I first felt what it was like to have the two decoupled, using Sun's openView system in 1992, I never wanted to go back.)

What really bothers me, and it is the main reason I have stopped using Gnome, is this: Developers often assume that the moment the computers get fast enough that they can respond to fancy graphic requests using 100% of the CPU time, that this is the point where all reasonable people would stop complaining about the time they take up, and would be happy to have the little graphic toys unconditionally turned on at all times. This I call "bullshit". It's only when the fancy graphic requests end up taking a teeny, tiny fraction of the CPU time that it starts to become acceptable to leave them uncoditionally on.

I don't just want fast response from my UI when the system is under light load. I also want fast response from my UI when there's a runaway process I need to find and kill, or when I'm calculating some big raytrace in the background. So, yes, even in this day and age where you can't find a new computer with less than a Gigahertz clock rate, it is STILL worth it to provide the user with the ability to turn off features that require a good amount of CPU usage.

It's up to the owner of the computer to decide what to spend their CPU time on, not the maker of the UI.

Re:#1 thing Apple should do...

I know it was a joke, but apple's GUI is rendered using the video card's processing power, not your CPU's. So such fancy effects are using cycles that would otherwise be idle, giving no performance hit at all, and making it look fricking cool at the same time.

Faster?

You've got to be kidding me. XP is CRAZY slower than 2k. I suppose thats what happens when you add a Microsoft+ package to Windows 2000. Wanna make it faster? Disable all the useless services and shut off the ugly eye candy. *sigh*.

Re:Faster?

Phase 1: Release software that has been deliberately (but discreetly) crippled in performance

Phase 2: Re-release same software under a different name or version, only uncrippled. Claim massive performance improvements.

Phase 3: Profit as everyone upgrades/migrates to your product because of the great performance reviews

Hey, it seems to work for AOL, and I bet it could work for Microsoft!
=Smidge=

Re:Faster?

XP is CRAZY slower than 2k.

XP is faster to come up to the desktop. However, it is still busy accessing the hard drive and loading stuff in the background. You still have to wait for the OS to quit loading itself before you can use anything. Microsoft's claim that XP is faster than 2K was based on the time to desktop, apparently not time to usability.

Once loaded, XP has an annoying habit of wanting to refresh the desktop from time to time. That slows things down even more.

Re:Faster?

"If that's what you mean by "refresh", then that's actually Windows Explorer (which the desktop is an instance of) crashing followed by a background process realizing it died and starting it back up."

Um, no. XP gives you an 'Explorer just crashed' message when it tanks. Heh my coworker next to me is actually having this 'explorer likes to crash regularly' problem. When you lose your taskbar and all your icons in the system tray disappear, then you know Explorer has gone south and restarted.

Windows does have a 'refresh and rebuild the desktop' function. It's the same one they use to put your desktop icons back when you change video modes. (I.e. playing a game.) That's exactly what the person is describing.

XP and OS X difference

upgrading from 2K to XP on the same hardware will slow you down. Upgreading from OS X 10.2 to 10.3 on the same hardware will give you speed improvements a majority of the time.

I can see how they can write an artice about how apple did this but to claim that Microsoft does it too. I don't see how. Unless Microsoft has improvements but enough of the new things they add slow it down so much more the gain is outweighted by the loss.

Re:XP and OS X difference

I've used both it and 2K on several machines, and XP boots up ~30 seconds faster

Microsoft tends to spend more time figuring out ways to trick their users into *thinking* that things are faster even though it's actually taking as long, if not longer than previous versions. In this case, you've been tricked. Microsoft moved more stuff after the user is logged on. In other words, your system is still doing all of the things it used to do, plus probably more, it's just that you think it's done.

This is the difference between reality and perception. Microsoft tries very hard to address a user's perception, even at the cost of making reality slower. As is, in the above cited example, Microsoft gave you a login screen, whereby, you can do very little to nothing, but you're satisified thinking it's done, in spite of the fact (reality) that it's not. This means, attempting to do things right after the login screen will more than likely, take much longer than expected. They further hide this fact by making application startup and caching part of the OS boot sequence. Non-cached application startup, following initial login, will more than likely be painfully slow for non-trvial applications, at least until XP actually finishes it's startup.

Good or bad, you decide.

Re:XP and OS X difference

Well, all I know is that my own experience is different from yours. Not to mention, my experience is generally regarded as recreatable. That is, while I'm "logged in", my machine is technically worthless until it's finished starting up the system and doing all the things that Linux makes you do up front. In other words, when I have my desktop on Linux, I can immediately start using it. Under 2K and especailly XP, I have to wait, wait, wait before the system is responsive to my applicatin requests. That's the way MS designed their system and that's the way everyone experiences it. I guess this goes back to the perception versus reality difference. Like I said, it's up to you to decide if it's good or bad. I say, "indifferent". You seem to say, "good". Others say, "bad".

It's worth noting, if nothing more than FYI points, there are ways to drastically speed up Linux's start up times. They range from using LinuxBios to changing out the init scripts for scripts which are are to run highly parallel. Last I heard, the init scripts alone, take off 10s of seconds. It's just that people would rather have UNIX and Linux compatibility.

At any rate, I'm really not sure what you mean by, "USABILITY" being faster. If you mean the speed of the overall system as it relates to user responsiveness, then I suspect you have something wrong with your Linux configuration. Usabiity between the two systems should be equally high. Personally, my usability goes way down on Windows systems because it lacks so many of the powerful X features, out of the box anyways. But, I recognize that I'm not the typical win/linux user.

Lastly, I must say that I find it interesting that you find XP to be faster than 2k. XP is widely regarded as being slower (yes, with everything turned off) than 2k, as far as the user interface is concerned.

Some of these differences might center in how we're using our systems. My uses tend to be more of a workstation/desktop while you're may center completely around a MS-desktop solution.

Re:Faster?

Ya, benchmark after benchmark showed all of XP's IPC mechanisms to be much, much slower than previous releases. IIRC, several other subsystems were found to be slower as well. By those in the know, XP is widely regarded as Microsoft's slowest OS release in a long while. The only reason it's not widely realized is that machines constantly get faster and more memory is being used which hides the additional bloat.

Anyone that thinks MS' OS, as a whole, is getting faster with each release is simply not living in our reality.

Reduce Bloat

why does my 3ghz p4 choke on spellchecking a 50k doc with a 500mb text editor (Word2k3) ?

why does explorer choke on listing 10,000 files ?

why should i ever upgrade my word processing applications ? or can they type for me now ?

bah, innovation is dead, shame

One word:

Hard Drive

Largest bottleneck in any modern system. If you've never had the opportunity to use a 15krpm (or something faster) system, do it now. It flies... I don't care if it is Windows or what... it doesn't matter when you've got usable bandwidth to the biggest chunk of storage out there.

Re:One word:

Hard Drive

That's two words.

Tom.

That's 2 words.

Anyway... You are completely correct but...

My 2 words are RAM DRIVE. You think you can't justify 4Gb of RAM? Course you can.

Dedicate 2-3Gb of it to a ram drive and mount it as your root, /usr, /opt partition, whichever one you have all of your applications installed on. Copy the hard drive to the ram drive at bootup. DD can do it quickly if you just zap the whole partition across. I think there are mount options to tell the Linux filesystem buffer not to cache a particular filesystem.

The difference in performance can be stunning.

Re:That's 2 words.

Doesn't most unixes extensive use of cache really eliminate the benefits of that approach? I know Mac OS X will use almost all of however much physical RAM it's given.

Re:One word:

Agreed. My Pent III 800 mghtz, SCSI computer (scsi hard drive, dvd player, cd rom) with 512 ram, Hercules 64 Meg video card runs games like Diablo II MUCH MUCH Faster then my 2.2 ghtz laptop with 512 ram, a better video card (Nvida GForce 4 Go card), "faster" IDE dvd rom. A better test. When I upgraded from IDE to SCSI I performed a DOS level copy. The screen would scroll and periodically pause when reading from the IDE drive. The IDE drive was 7600 RPM, the SCSI HD is 15k. When it would write to the SCSI drive, it FLEW! Never once did it pause. WHile scsi is expensive, runs extremely hot (meaning you need more fans), and is fickle at best - when it works it does WONDERS.... For those people who like to have a RAID system - SCSI is still faster as it reads & writes faster... but again it is more expensive (usually about double - triple) -A

Re:One word:

Yes, but a 10,000 RPM SATA drive is so expensive! A 73.4GB Western Digital "Raptor" 10,000 RPM is the same price as a 250GB Maxtor MaXLine Plus II 7200 RPM.

Maybe 10,000 RPM model would make a good boot drive with all of the home folders on the 250GB 7200 RPM drive. Then again, most file access would probably be from the slower drive. Eh.

Re:One word:

Improved relatively little? Average overall seek times are:

5400 RPM 11 ms
7200 RPM 8 ms
10K RPM 5 ms
15K RPM 4 ms

Name another common mechanical device that has nearly tripled in speed in that period. (Source: seagate.com, all numbers are for 3.5" disks)

Re:One word:

With buffer cache you're always going to have to touch the disk at some point and that point wastes billions of CPU cycles.

Most systems nowadays use a DMA-type system (Direct Memory Access) [pcguide.com] which streams data directly from disk to memory without involving the CPU much at all. The real slowdown is not the CPU cycles getting wasted, it's that the CPU can't work on the particular data you need until it is loaded. During the DMA loading process your CPU could be using tons of cycles on other tasks that are not waiting on data.

Smart read-ahead precaching and buffering attempts to ensure that your processes will not be data-starved. Yes, buffering can fall behind but overall it does considerably speed up a system.

pretty much

So pretty much, Mac and Windows are made faster by using resources when they're not being used already. Not a genius idea, but the hard part is figuring out how to do that, which is what the article discusses.

Haven't read the article yet ..

.. but I thought that the primary 'reason' for OSX slowness was that Apples binary format is designed to maintain 'compatability' with the register set of the 68k processors, and in fact they're not using all the PPC registers in a way that is most efficient?

I haven't looked into it for a while (mod me down for being uncertain if you like), but I seem to recall that there were serious leaps and bounds still left in OSX performance, with a change to the ABI register use, potentially, in the future ...

Re:Haven't read the article yet ..

I dunno about all that but OS X doesn't seem slow at all to me.

Try running LinuxPPC on your mac some day, and you will see a huge difference in general snappiness.

I'm not saying OSX is un-usably slow, or even slow at all - heck my Rev. A tiBook, beaten and aged, is still all the computer I need, and I am very productive with it ... but I do have to admit that in all my computing experiences, OSX seems to be the one OS that is more 'acceptably mediocre', performance wise, than any other.

On the register side of things, I can't for the life of me remember the full details, but I believe that the ABI for OSX only uses a sub-set of the PPC's full register set, and thus this means more swaps in/out ... that there are 'unutilized registers' in the PPC architecture when it is running OSX.

This is separate from AltiVec, which is an instruction set, not just a register setup ...

Re:Haven't read the article yet ..

The only thing that's even remotely like what you're talking about is the Mach-O ABI and how it accesses global addresses.

Mach-O the ABI (not to be confused with Mach-O the executable format, which is totally different) accesses global addresses via PC-relative addressing. This design decision was made back in the NeXT days, and made a lot of sense at the time. Unfortunately, the PowerPC doesn't have any support for PC-relative addressing, so the only way to do it is to use several instructions and induce a pipeline stall in the process. Depending on how a program is written, this problem can mean up to a 10% speed hit.

That is the only brain-dead decision in the ABI that I'm aware of. It certainly makes good use of all registers, intelligently defines leaf procedures, and in general makes full use of the PPC architecture other than that one problem.

Altivec includes both instructions and processors. That is one of the things that makes Altivec really cool, is that it has a shitload of vector registers that are totally separate from the other registers, and don't interfere in any way.

Re:Haven't read the article yet ..

OS X is a new development for PowerPC, not an improved 68K based system like OS 7

This is incorrect. Mac OS X actually dates back to the mid-eighties and was originally developed for... yup, 680x0 based systems (I believe the original NeXT Cube had a 68020, can't be bothered to look it up now.) On top of which, in its original form, it was based on other pre-existing components such as the Mach kernel which date back even further.

Sorry!

optimizing Windows 2000/XP

Check out www.blackviper.com [blackviper.com], it's one of the better sites dedicated to tuning and increasing performance of Windows 2000/XP

The Only True Solution

More hamsters!

Am I Supposed To Be Impressed By Apple?

After all, they make OS X for a very limited subset of hardware that they also produce (or at least assemble). Presumably they write all the drivers (or at least have input to them) and are already making use of a lot of good work from the Open Source community.

What takes genius is getting every ounce of speed from a Linux or Windows box that can be a conglomeration of different motherboards, CPUs, graphics cards, hard disks, etc.

Re:Am I Supposed To Be Impressed By Apple?

Actually, if you had bothered with reading the article instead of repeating the old Apple has it easy with limited hardware cliché, you would have noticed that this is absolutely not related to driver performance.

Only one optimisation presented is related to hardware drivers, and it is cache of what kernel extensions will probably be loaded. Most of the optimisations (basically lots of caching and dynamic defragmentation) could be implemented in Linux, regardless of the amount of supported hardware.

Re:Am I Supposed To Be Impressed By Apple?

Eh.. I'd argue differently.

IMHO, the next major revolution in OS design (and performance) will be from an exokernel [mit.edu] architecture. For those who aren't familiar with them, it's a completely radical and different approach to kernel design, the main idea behind it is seperate protection from management. If you really think about it, who (I use that term loosely) would know better what resources, scheduling, etc an application will need - the kernel, or the application itself.

Traditional kernel design techniques give the (pretty much) the entire management of resources to the kernel itself and hide it behind a HAL (hardware abstraction layer), allowing the application little to zero say in the matter. Exokernels throw that idea out of the window, taking a completely opposite view on the issue. Once you give the power to the application, it opens a whole new world of OS design.

It's really quite interesting, for more information on different kernel designs you can check out the Microkernel entry [thefreedictionary.com] at thefreedictionary.com

Speed Improvements on Old Hardware

I've been using OS X since public beta, and every upgrade has been considerably faster, even on my four-year old G4/400. I expect to be using that machine as a server well into the future, mostly due to the fact that Apple is doing such a good job making operating systems work well on older machines.

And the fact that I won't be discouraged from keeping 10.3 or 10.4 on that system if the next version doesn't support my hardware through annoying EULAs.

Hello? Linux, are you there?

I wish these were incorporated into linux more. I don't care what anyone says, comparing windows and linux on the same machine has always shown to ME that windows seems a lot faster. Applications take longer to load in linux. Mozilla for example, takes longer to load than it did in windows on the same computer. Other applications that I can't compare directly seem to take a while when they're just small apps.

Aparently, windows caches a bunch of stuff and has a bunch other little hacks that allows this. So why can't linux and the kde people do this. They've copied everything else, why not this?

Before you mod me as flamebait or troll, I switched over to linux a while ago and I have no intention on going back to windows. I'm not some ms fanboy bitching about my 10 minute experience with linux. All I'm saying is that here are some points where linux annoys me.

Re:Hello? Linux, are you there?

-1, Misinformation. Office and IE don't keep "portions" resident in memory in either the DOS TSR sense *or* in the Mozilla Quickstart (or whatever it's called now) sense.

The case of mshtml.dll, shdocvw.dll, urlmon.dll are a little different. These are *system DLLs* which can be used by any app, including IE (iexplore.exe) -- and the shell (explorer.exe). Explorer in particular will load urlmon if you visit FTP or WebDAV sites.

IIRC after login on a fresh Windows 2000 install, none of mshtml, shdocvw or urlmon are loaded.

Note that Working Set Detection/Maintenance on Windows can change this over time, but it will do so even for Firefox or any other non-MS app.

Btw, the real reason IE and Office start up quickly is because they are better engineered that the competition -- which is typically cross-platform portable code that is not particularly optimized for Windows. Reducing startup time is not necessarily a black art:

[...] Startup time is all about minimizing disk I/O. So analyze your startup code to death: Track every page fault and work to get rid of it. Delay initialization of everything that can be delayed. (The fastest code is code that doesn't run at all.) Take all the functions that are called at startup and put them near each other in memory so you take fewer page faults. Use the /ORDER switch to do this. If you have a large function and only half of it is used at startup, break it into two functions, the part used at startup and the part that isn't. Reorder your data so all the memory used by startup is kept near each other in memory. With CPUs as fast as they are, disk I/O is the limiting factor in app startup. [

link [msdn.com]]

The true measure is how fast the app runs, not how fast it opens.

Not sure what your point is, but Open Office and Mozilla both run slower (_and_ open slower) than Office and IE on comparable hardware. Thankfully, Firefox opens slower than IE, but is almost as fast in use for most common tasks, which lets me use it for day-to-day browsing.

Re:Hello? Linux, are you there?

KDE apps has down right painful startup times, especially if you don't run KDE. That being said, I find parity in application start ups between the two and generally find Linux to be faster for most everything I do, save only for playing games (like NWN).

Some efforts have been going into making KDE and KDE applications start up faster. Just the same, if it bothers you that much, don't run KDE or KDE applications. There are many window managers to pick from. Even GTK+ applications tend to load much faster than KDE applications (C versus C++, which is the root of one of the speed issues).

The overall performance of X and Linux will be faster and more responsive as the 2.6 kernel starts to become more common. A typical desktop user should see something like 20%-40% better performance and responsiveness. Even servers typically see 20%-30% improvement in almost all areas. Improvements like these, make applications like apache and samba, which already blew the doors off of Windows, that much more impressive.

Beyond that, start up time, in my mind, is a complete waste of time. Unlike Windows, Linux does not become unstable as you load more applications into memory. Start your computer and all of your applications (memory is cheap; tuning you swappiness as needed) and never have to load them again. I find that application crashes are rare; well, the ones I run. This means, rarely needing to restart your applications. As such, restart time is lost in noise. Furthermore, system stability can easily be measured in months or years as long as you're not running a closed source 3rd party driver (*cough* nvidia, ati).

Long story short, while I hear you and think you have a valid point, the long of it is, it's completely lost in the noise and really doesn't matter.

Good basis of metrics for O/S

After the government changes in the US and the DOJ is free to investigate monopolism in software again...

How hard would it be to make the case that consumers would be advantaged by gaining access to just a basic o/s?

It mightn't be easy because the courts are legal organs not technical forums, but with a disciplined argument based on metrics derived from the types of performance issues noted in the article... an articulate, intelligent lawyer might get this done.

Right?

The FIVE things Apple did to make OS X faster.

Is it just me or are the first six items all caching schemes?

Some tips on making your computer faster

1) Don't install so much crap on your computer. 5 megapixel photos set as wallpaper along with Real Player, Gator Spyware Crap, Quicktime Task, HP scanner registration reminder sofware, webshots, Norton anything, MS office bar etc running on startup will make your nice shiny new computer run like an arthritic snail on sleeping tablets.

2) Turn off some of the eyecandy. All those fades and whooshes and stuff don't actually do anything useful, they just consume CPU cycles and waste your time.

3) Use Ad Aware and SpyBot regularly to keep scumware out of your computer. I had to clean up a PC this morning which had stopped working because the BASTARDS at NewDotNet wrote some software which fucked the TCP/IP stack backwards.

4) Defrag regularly and run MSCONFIG to check what crap is sneaking back on to your Startup scripts.

BTW, Windows 3.1 sitting on MSDOS 6.2 ran like shit of a stick on my old P133. I wonder if/how it would run on a modern system?

Re:Some tips on making your computer faster

5 megapixel photos set as wallpaper

Actually, Quartz does an extremely good job of displaying 6.2 megapixel images on the desktop even on slow and old Macs.

All those fades and whooshes and stuff don't actually do anything useful, they just consume CPU cycles and waste your time.

Most of that is handed off to the GPU via Quartz Extreme.

Defrag regularly

HFS Plus already does that for me.

Prebinding not all good

Sure, prebinding does speed up loading, but it also breaks everything from tripwire, to backup. Since the file is changed out from under you, all traditional unix tools that use checksums or file size to determine file changes break.

Apple, and other system vendors need to consider these types of management issues when making a change. Speed improvements are only good if they are "management friendly"

Missing Step

The number one thing they should do IMHO is reduce overhead. Using Microsoft Windows as an example, windows 98 has much less overhead than 2k, which in turn has much less than XP. A lot of it is eye-candy, which is all well and good, but those should be options that are OFF by default. XP differs from previous versions because it uses a 'shell' based gui (similar to KDE / GNOME, etc), which, while nice, is going to cause some system slowdown. Using the 'explorer' shell, which is heavily intergrated into the Windows OS, is the fastest, and should be the default. Then if people want to change it to look pretty [litestep.net] they can, by sacrificing speed (in slower machines).

Stop adding services / features that are on by default, and you'll see a huge improvement in speed.

Re:Missing Step

I'm not sure if one can say on a general level that even the majority of users considers speed to be important. I'll take up OS X because I remember reading a quote on an Apple webpage -- Why did we do it [fancy graphics *everywhere*]? Because we could.

I'll simplify the comparison quiter a bit, but I think Apple decided to trade speed for distinguishing features. It must've worked, because people noticed.

ibook speed

all I can say is that I was on an ibook 933mhz that was loaded up with programs, I hit the expose key and it was FAST.

This comes through rendering GUI through the graphics card. Something linux will have trouble with due to GLP vs binary drivers from NVIDIA and ATI.

I floated the idea a while back that we need "open source" hardware designs so that there is a open design for a fast graphics card.

All the cards are basically made in taiwan fabs from designs from elsewhere anyway. The only problem is patents....

Apparent Speed

Of course one could argue that is worth making the GUI faster to give an apparent speed increase whilst allowing improvments in CPU/Disk to carry the rest of the OS. Then again of course I know nothing about system design

Rus

Hard drive alternatives

Hard Drive is the bottleneck........ Has anyone tried using a RAMdisk as their OS drive? I've read a lot and heard of people trying, but never come across a comprehensive how-to + review. With the amount of ram we can have nowadays (new pc's coming with 6 banks for dual-channel DDR), I'd pay $250 for an extra 2GB of ram in order to have my OS + key apps run off of that. Other solutions? (CF too slow?)...

Macs used to be RAM disk bootable

Has anyone tried using a RAMdisk as their OS drive?

Many moons ago, it was possible to make a RAM disk on a Mac, install an OS on it, and (warm) boot from it. It would remain in memory and work perfectly as long as the computer wasn't shut down-- it could only be restarted. I tried it once or twice just to check it out, and the computer booted and ran like lightning compared to the normal hard drive boot.

One of the utility suites back then (Central Point Utilities?) even had a feature where the machine would boot from a RAM disk with the utils on it, to fix the occasional really serious Mac problem.

Booting from a RAM disk stopped being possible after Apple made a hardware change in newer Macs that had the side-effect of making the RAM non-persistent through warm-reboots (i.e., your RAM disk would go bye-bye). I forget exactly when it happened... perhaps after the first generation of Power Macs, when they went from using NuBus to using PCI?

Here's another interesting fact. The Macintosh Classic, released in 1990, had System 6.0.8 (IIRC) burned into its ROM-- you could boot it disklessly from the OS in ROM by holding down Command-Option-O-X at startup. Nobody really knows what that feature was intended for.

~Philly

Making Linux Faster

For you noobs out there, here's how to make Linux faster.

Download yourself the latest cutting-edge gcc from the 3.5.0 branch on CVS and do a make bootstrap. Install this over your original C compiler.

Get the latest 2.6.7-preX kernel from kernel.org and configure it with no modules: everything build it. Modules slow you down.

Enable all the EXPERIMENTAL drivers. They are ususally much faster than the old ones that may have been in the kernel now for 6 or more months.

When you have saved your configuration, hack the top level Makefile to add "-O9 -fomit-instructions" in the CFLAGS macro.

time gmake -j64 bootstrap. Even if you have a single CPU system, building with lots of processes in parallel is faster because it soaks up CPU idle time when waiting on I/O operations.

Enjoy.

Perhaps...

Perhaps we should look at the other side of this equation. Namely, "What makes each new OS release appear slower".

I for one cannot honestly say that I think WinXP is any faster than Win2K, nor was Win2K any faster than Win98, and so on.
Now naturally I relize that individual components become faster. But the overall feel seems to slow down each release. The same thing applies to Linux, in the form of each new release of taking longer to login and initialize.

Um, speaking of Mac OS, that's not true for it

People have said this before, but maybe you didn't catch it: Successive releases of OS X have actually been noticably faster, even on older machines.

Don't take my word for it -- take Ars Technica's [arstechnica.com] review of Panther for example:

Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.

faster use of preference files: TtoF

Early versions of some film scanner software that I worked on were terribly slow. A quick profile of the running code showed that about 10% of the time was spent in a little piece of code called TtoF(). This code parsed and coverted text into floats.

The earliest versions of the software did not convert key preference/calibration/setup files into internally stored numerical values -- instead, anytime the code needed a calibration/setup value, it went to the file, read it, and converted it. Needless to say, that "feature" was quickly corrected.

That's not as bad as an early VAX image processing program that prepped newly allocated file space by setting all the bytes to zero, one byte at a time.

Order of CPU hogging

On any given day these are my top CPU hogging activities.

1.) Games
2.) M$ Apps
3.) Firewall Apps

How I would improve the speed of the system...

Rewrite it!

This holds especially for applications, but it definitely applies to operating systems as well. Most modern software is simply bloated beyond belief.

BeOS, by all accounts, is a full-fledged OS, and it takes a Pentium (not Pentium 4, but original Pentium) 15 seconds to boot it, including the GUI. What's up with Windows and OS X taking over a minute on hardware that is several times faster?! On Linux, you could at least skip most of the init stuff and boot in seconds (likely mostly pauses that you have to keep for faulty PC hardware).

Then there's the libraries. glibc is well over 5 megabytes. You are not going to convince me that isn't bloatware. If all that code doesn't eat CPU time, it at least eats memory, which could lead to more swapping. GTK is also typical - ever resize a GTKWindow? It's visibly slow! That doesn't happen to Windows 3.11 on my grandpa's 486! What is that code doing?!

Applications... Firefox is what? 10 megabytes installed size? And that's a light weight browser. What? We need 10 megabytes on top of libc, X, and GTK for parsing a simple markup language and rendering those widgets? Excuse me! Even lynx is hundreds of kilobytes, and it mostly just reads data from a socket, strips the tags, and spits it straight out. What the fsck? Say "OpenOffice.org" or Java and I'll explode.

All we have today is bloatware. I'm *really* tempted to roll my own OS and applications, and I am going to have a shot at it this summer.

Re:How I would improve the speed of the system...

I have a nice utility from Logitech called iTouch. What does it do? It handles key mappings for their keyboard that has some custom key.

Application memory space during runtime? 15MB.

I remember when Borland spend a lot of effort to optimize their Quattro Pro spreadsheet so that it was monitoring it's own memory usage down to 512 byte increments. It would start discarding portions of itself that it no longer needed.

Those days are over, for sure.

Easy!

CFLAGS="-O99 -march=p4 -fomit-frame-pointer"

At least, that's what I heard on IRC. Oh, and use about a gram of silicone grease on the northbridge - that'll speed up your RAM.

What a surprise- MS does the same stuff, but...

...apparently not as well as Apple. Gee, didn't see that coming.

Every revision of OS X has run (or at least "felt") faster than its predecessor did on the same hardware. Panther will run fine on a five year-old G4, assuming you've added RAM to what the machine shipped with in 1999.

You absolutely cannot say that about Windows. Nobody sane would even consider trying to run XP on a PC they bought new in 1999. One of Microsoft's growing problems is that people are getting off the upgrade treadmill-- they've begun to REFUSE to upgrade to version n+1 because they know their computer will feel slower than it does with version n.

I've got a 733MHz G4 running OS X 10.2.8, and a home built (with *quality* parts) Athlon XP 2600 system running XP, and there's no comparison... the XP box feels terribly slower, even heavily optimized with all the XP eye candy shit turned off, unneeded services disabled and spyware, etc ruthlessly prevented/exterminated. OS X running on a machine with 1/3 of the horsepower thoroughly embarasses it in terms of user-perceived speed. That's just plain pathetic.

Opinion from an ex-microsoftie

I worked there for years, through the development of Win95 Osr2, Win98, Win98 SE, Win ME (but that one wasn't my fault), WIn 2k, Win XP and into the first little bit of Longhorn... Longhorn will be as slow as or slower than the current XP systems, even when properly configured. We don't call it "Bloatware" for nothing. One way to make it faster is to cut out all the crap. If someone wants to install Solitaire, FANTASTIC, let them choose to do so, but for crap sake, DON'T install it by default... Fix the File Tables, Fat32 was good, NTFS is better, they say the new schema for Longhorn will be better, if they can ever get it working... If a user wants the colors and blinking things, then let them set it that way...don't make that the default... Just because a processor can hit 3.2 GHz DOES NOT mean you have to use every Hz of speed... Just because Hard Disks are not in the hundreds of GB, does not mean you must fill it up with an OS... Just because memory is "cheep" and some systems can handle 2 gig or more, does not mean you must use the whole thing to manage your OS... The system requirements for Longhorn are rediculous at best...when Longhorn ships, Linux will finally get the break it needs!

Looking elsewhere

This is technically offtopic, but often much of the 'slowness' we still experience on our computers which people often blame on their 'operating system' isn't really down to the operating system (i.e. kernel), but more the higher level stuff that runs on top of it. It seems that lots of efforts are going into making operating systems more efficient, since there's lots of interest in this area, but that efficiency is more than lost further up. (Not that I should be complaining, since I'm just another person not doing anything about it.)

Try running Windows NT on a new Intel system (say 2-3GHz) for example - it'll run blazingly fast, and with software versions from around the same time it'll still do much of what everyone wants to do - email, web, office, graphics manipulation - but really much faster - things will load practically instantly, rather than after five or ten seconds, and it's all still nice and graphical and everything, just like people want.

Many (but not all) XP machines I meet still seem to take 2-10 seconds even to do basic things such as open My Computer, Internet Explorer or a properties dialog, which one has to wonder is worth the wait for the extra functionality - basically lots of drivers, a couple of extra bundled programs and supported file formats, minor changes to the interface and the other couple of things I'll get flamed for forgetting. Microsoft have no doubt made some improvements to the kernel between releasing NT and releasing XP, but most still seem to be no faster to use, if not slower.

I maintained a school network up until last year which still ran NT and KDE2 on around 2/3 of systems, and then when my replacement went and wiped everything out and replaced it with new machines running XP (with an enormous cost to them), many staff told me that there were lots of things that didn't work any more, and there'd be frequent outages of the entire network.

On a Linux+X system, running X on its own (i.e. just the one program you want) or with a light window manager (fvwm or whatever) is again noticeably faster than running Gnome or KDE. Loading Mozilla or OpenOffice.org means loading the entire frameworks they run in, and often we're loading up a great deal of functionality we don't want in that particular situation. I think a good example is Dillo [dillo.org], a web browser written entirely in C that just does the basics (launches in around 0.7 seconds on this Athlon 700 system, compared to Mozilla, which takes around 5, and Mozilla Firefox, which isn't far off that) - it'd be interesting to see if they could add things like CSS or SSL support and still keep it fast.

FS Journaling

Filesystem journaling does not make the filesystem faster, and it's silly to suggest that it does.

In fact, journaled filesystems are generally noticeably (one might say significantly) slower than non-journaled ones.

The only 'performance' gain one gets from journaling is after an unclean dismount (a crash or power outage). The system will boot up much quicker, but that's it.

Windows...

I know this is an unpopular view (hence AC), but Windows XP is very fast for a lot of things.

One of the reasons I dont use Linux as my desktop is the office packages. Under windows, I can type ctrl+alt+w (My shortcut for MS Word) and it starts INSTANTLY! Not 5 or 10 seconds, like OpenOffice. Call it bloated or whatever, but it works the way I like.

For example, run any program and look in %windir%\Prefetch - and try run it again and look at the speed difference.

There was a discussion about this on the kernel development mailing list a couple of months ago I think, and the approach used by windows was considered.

I also use Maya a lot, and other operating systems it has been ported to (I havent used IRIX) have problems
with various graphics cards and/or sound. OS X has worse performance than windows for the same price for running Maya as a workstation or a rendernode.

All the eyecandy and other crap is very easy to turn off... things work a lot better on a wider variety of hardware than any other OS. Linux has a lot of driver support, but nowhere near that of Windows still :(

You want fast!

Then avoid bloated multi-library dependent C++ GUIs.

To me the ultimate example of this is Damnsmall Linux [damnsmalllinux.org], nothing but lean and mean apps!

If a computer is 10x more powerful then it was 7 years ago it should be doing 10x the amount of work, instead we get more and more eye candy.

Making Operating Systems Crash Faster

The story below this has the word "crash" in the title so my brain combined the two into a more interesting topic.

-prator

OS/2 Warp

Do like IBM did with OS/2's big revision Warp. All the changes to Warp slowed performance down in general so IBM used smoke and mirrors. They worked on speeding up screen I/O as much as possible. End users raved about how fast Warp was. Looks faster, feels faster, but any program that required much prcessing was getting slower and slower. But joe user thought he had a speed deamon becasue the screen painted real fast.

Apple II series rules on boot-up times

1. turn on apple II series box.
2. Press Ctrl+break (? it's been a looong time since I used one).
3. You're done.
It takes under 2 seconds. Show me a "new" machine (see: desktop,server or notebook from the last 5 years) that actually boots that fast, please! (not just turns on the monitor)

Re:Apple II series rules on boot-up times

It's not exactly "booting", but if you take a sleeping Apple notebook and wake it up, it'll usually be ready to use before you even get the lid all the way open. Re-establishing a wireless connection takes a few seconds, but local functionality all comes back on instantly.

Sleep vs Hibernate

10. Instant-on

Apple computers do not hibernate. Rather, when they "sleep", enough devices (in particular, the dynamic RAM) are kept alive (at the cost of some battery life, if the computer is running on battery power). Consequently, upon wakeup, the user perceives instant-on behavior: a very desirable effect.

I don't know how they can be proud of not hibernating. Windows can sleep OR hibernate. Although being a Mac household, hibernation is one reason I MIGHT consider windows for my next laptop. The ability to get back to all you have left around with your laptop hibernating for a few days unplugged and still have full battery power when you open it up is VERY nice.

Apply the Brakes. . .

So, since they defragment-on-the-fly and do hot-file-clustering, then to slow Mac down, write code that is 21 MB in size, and make it critical to a wave of resources so the file is always being accessed. It will not be defragmented nor optimally grouped.

Are you listening, Bill?

Easy, economic solution

device=himem.sys
device=emm386.exe noems
files=40
buffers=10
smartdrv c+ 10000

Prebinding is worst misfeature of MacOS X

Whenever you install new software, you have to wait while the system "optimizes" it, which in fact means checking for applications that need their prebinding redone. On a 700MHz imac - less than 2 years old - this sometimes takes 15 minutes or more. Since I bought it, I've wasted hours, if not days, waiting for installations to complete because of this, which is far longer (and more frustrating) than the total time saved starting programs.

I don't understand why it doesn't just leave the prebinding to be done the first time the program is run.

Faster boots, and an idea

The boot cache seems like a neat idea. Read-ahead caching is normally predictive but the predictions are just guesses. But if there's a sequence of events that goes the same way every time, yeah, I guess it makes sense to log it and use that info for reading ahead next time.

One thing I just remembered that annoys me about the Linux dists that I have used, is that all the startup scripts are executed in sequence, even if they aren't dependent on one another. On my Amiga, I remember I used to have the startup script execute all sorts of things asyncronously in parallel, so that the CPU never idled while waiting on disk.

Maybe Unix-like OSes should do that. I mean, there's no reason /etc/init.d/postfix and /etc/init.d/apache can't run at the same time, so that if one of 'em blocks on some I/O (disk or network or whatever) then the CPU(s) can work on the other one. That would ultimately result in a faster boot.

Sure, there are some dependencies (I guess you want network interfaces started up before servers start binding to ports, for example) but there are ways of dealing with that. Hm.. maybe there's already a tool that sort of handles the complexity of dependencies and can execute things in parallel when appropriate: make. Hmm... Anyone already doing this?

Make it faster?

Add RAM -- Works for me everytime.

My OS Tweaks Itself for Performance.

Seriously. I have mandrake 9.2 installed on my computer. Unfortunately, my computer is a Pentium II, 266. Because of this, it spares me the fancy graphical boot and shutdown screens automatically. I'm sure there's a couple other enhancements it does to run on my slow computer. It runs very quickly I find for such a slow computer. Only things that don't run quickly are those that require tons of processing power.

Two kinds of speed

There are two kinds of speed: things that are fast and things that feel fast.

The article and the comments here on /. are mainly talking about true benchmarkable speed. Things that are fast.

But some apps don't really need to be fast. They just have to feel fast. This holds true for most interactive applications. It's all about psycholigy with this one.

Ever wondered why Windows Explorer builds up its icons from the right bottom to the top left? Doesn't matter in real speed, but it just feels faster. Your brain just isn't used to this flow: usually you read from the top left to the bottom right, or you read from the top right to the bottom left. Your eyes immediately focus on the spot your brain expects the icons to appear. But instead the appear in the opposite corner. By the time your brain figures out it has been tricked, the window is already full of icons.

More tricks: ever wondered why windows wastes memory by trying to have some free memory ready all the time? It makes starting new apps faster. But on average the system is slower.

In the Unix world there is only raw, benchmarkable speed. And that's why KDE and Gnome are slow. They aren't slow, they just feel slow.

Tip for Gentoo users

"Recompile it on every PC" isn't on this list for a reason.

LIEING BASTARDS!!!!

If OS's were really faster they'd require LESS processing power and LESS memory. If only OSX would boot up on my G4 the way OS9 did on my G4....If only XP booted up as fast on my P4 as Win2K did on my P3.... :(

It doesn't really matter to me how you explain why an OS is "faster" if when I upgrade to it, I have to upgrade my hardware to "see" the speed increase...

Fast?

FASTS? Operating systems are FASTS???

My tv is fast, my player or car are also fast, just press the ON button and voila it WORKS!.

I just don't understand why after 30 years of technology I still have to wait MINUTES for a computer to simply go on. Computer and software design was frozen 30 years back, it's a shame.

What's in a sig?

windows speed increase

Create an IE-free installation CD [earthlink.net]

Mac OS X speed increase

Eric Hensema says that Microsoft designed icon appearance to fool you into thinking that Windows is faster than it actually is. So they spent expensive programmer/designer time that could have been used to actually make Windows faster on psychological tricks. This is an outrage.

Building blocks

I'm not exactly sure how this stuff works, someone mentioned something about the libraries, such as glibc, GTk, ect... How often does these things get updated, or are they just expanded upon. If so, we've been expanding on something that was created eons ago. Maybe a rewrite of these, the building blocks of all the rest of the software we write, could help?

Just my 2c...

Re:Optimize Windows...

Step 1: Buy a G5 Mac.
Step 2: There is no step 2!!!

Re:Here's that list trimmed down to just 3 steps

Actually, the secret to selling an OS is to add MORE bloat. Shit most people don't need, but that appeal to a tiny segment with a large purse. For example, OS X by default installs some 20 languages for everything, including tutorials and help files. Removing these afforded me 10 gig of space. Removing extraneous versions of Java (I had seven!!) and "receipts" (caches of installed packages) grabbed me another 2.5 gig.

Forcing me to remove this stuff after the fact also forced me to learn what it was and prevented me from removing essential files. Compare this with Gentoo Linux -- where you have to know what everything does BEFORE you install it, and where you can easily leave out essential modules because they are poorly marked -- and you see which provides a more reliable operating system without sacrificing customizability. And all it takes are a few extra gigs; in a time when even expensive micronized hardware is less than $2 per gig, that's no big deal.