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