Don’t Give Me More Speed, Give Me Efficiency
The raw processing power of modern Macs would fry even an original iMac, but all that speed doesn’t necessarily mean you get the job done faster. If there are inefficiencies in the system, you can end up wasting a lot of time staring at beach balls.
The worst offenders are web browsers. Browsers are the bane of our lives. You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t live without them.
In an online world, email clients and browsers are always on. My email client, though, doesn’t butcher my system like browsers do.
With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, “Hello browser my old fiend, you’ve come to torment me again, with the sounds of silence.”
That silence is the sound of me waiting for the browser to give me back my system.
Please, can someone develop a browser that is not a resource hog? Even when you’ve got dozens of pages open?
I don’t care anymore if it loads pages two seconds slower, because these fast browsers are sucking time right out of my life. With my browser open and several pages loaded, waking my Mac from sleep can take several minutes. Switching applications when my browser is feeling roguish can take even longer.
So what do I care if a page takes even 10 seconds longer to load if I know the browser isn’t going to give my system the proverbial kick to the groin? Why put effort into developing browsers to load pages faster when we’re connecting at higher and higher speeds? Put the effort into making browsers more efficient.
I run Safari 3 and, yes, it loads pages faster, but it still torments me with beach balls. I’ve tried Firefox and experienced exactly the same grief—along with more crashes. Safari 2 was also just as problematic. Opera had those and other issues that discouraged me from using it. Others, such as Camino and Shiira, are built on the same engines as Firefox and Safari, so I’m totally pessimistic about them being any better.
And to think the world is moving to browser based applications. Scary!
Another bane of my Mac life is Spotlight. I just think about other disks and it starts re-indexing. And if an application accesses a large number of files at one time, the mds process (which is all to do with metadata and indexing) goes berserk.
And as for the Intel CPU, my experience with it has been less than enjoyable. The kids’ G4 eMac and the school’s iMac G4s and PowerMac G5s (single processor, 1GB RAM) run more efficiently than my iMac Core 2 Duo. Yes they are slower, but I do a lot less thumb twiddling on them. Consider that at school, as I’m studying graphic design, I usually have Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Safari all running at the same time. Whereas I avoid that situation as much as possible on my iMac at home. A caveat: at school we run Adobe CS1, at home I’m running CS3. However, this shouldn’t make a difference considering the ages of the machines and applications are matched.
More memory should make a difference, but it shouldn’t have to; it’s not like my iMac is years old trying to run leading edge applications.
So, you can rave about your quadruple-eight-core-multi-dimensional-ten-gigahertz CPUs that’ll compute the billionth digit of pi before you’ve even thought to ask the question, but if the rest of the system is nutting it, the CPU is wasted. Give me back my PPC CPU.
On Intel Macs, somewhere between operating system, applications, memory, hard disk, and CPU, there’s a major bottleneck. Tiger was the first iteration of OS X for Intel processors and possibly the problems lie within.
Let’s hope a significant efficiency improvement is one of Leopard’s major secrets, because at the moment, the Intel is the most inefficient Mac I’ve used.
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This is ludicrous. If you spend your time waiting for your iMac C2D, there’s a problem with your machine. They go like the blazes.
I don’t know how much you have, but modern OS X needs >1GB of RAM to run acceptably.
Heheh, reminds of Spaceballs and “ludicrous speed”.
BTW, yep, have C2D with 1GB and - other than browsers and Spotlight - it did run ok until about Feb/March this year. Since then, it’s been a dog.
Now, you could say I’ve overloaded it, and yes I have, with all sorts of add-ons. But I did the same with my PowerBook and never had this problem in three years I had it.
If there’s a problem with my machine itself, how do I get Apple to believe me??!
I usually have Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Safari all running at the same time.
Are all or these Intel native? I’m assuming that even if there is a UB version available, you’re probably using whatever version you used on your old Mac, right? Are they the PowerPC versions of those apps? That could be part of your speed issue right there.
As for browsers, well, that’s what you have to live with if you want XHTML, Javascript, CSS, Flash, AJAX and all that other fancy crap. Welcome to “Web 2.0”. Browsers have become some of the most complex applications we run because they have to interpret all kinds of crappy HTML, Javascript and other embedded content, often very poorly coded.
An email client, by comparison, is a walk in the park. Email is just text… Sure there is occasionally some HTML formatting, but email doesn’t have to support all the other bells and whistles that a web browser does, and even if an email client adds support for all those bells and whistles, it only needs to load those rendering engine(s) when you get an email with all kinds of crap in it (which is rarely—most HTML email is just text effects, no javascript, external style sheets or other hooey).
Software is complex, but browsers take the cake in that they have to do so many different things and do them well. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of memory and CPU… and sometimes it’s not even the browser’s fault. If everyone created lightweight web pages and used strict coding practices to build them, you’d see a lot less work being done by your browser, but that just isn’t the case.
This is not a Mac-specific problem. Browsers on all platforms suck. The first thing you should do is disable Flash. Flash is a ginormous memory hog. I’d say diable Javascript too, but let’s face it—most sites won’t even load without Javascript enabled these days.
The second thing you should do—learn good coding practices. Since you’re a design student, you’re going to have to know HTML, some Javascript and CSS. Do it right. Learn how to code pages that pass the strictest XHTML validators. If you build tight code, browsers will never choke on your sites and render them quickly and easily. Be a part of the solution.
It looks like somebody missed their nappy time. LOL
Can I ask how much hard drive space you have left?
9GB of 57GB on my system disk, Benji
@VB
Are all or these Intel native? Are they the PowerPC versions of those apps? That could be part of your speed issue right there.
I am using UB on Intel and PPC versions on the PPC Macs. It just seems to me though, the PPC Mac have better, faster and more efficient memory management. Be interested to hear a uber-tech’s thoughts on that.
Software is complex, but browsers take the cake in that they have to do so many different things and do them well. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of memory and CPU… and sometimes it’s not even the browser’s fault. If everyone created lightweight web pages and used strict coding practices to build them, you’d see a lot less work being done by your browser, but that just isn’t the case.
This is not a Mac-specific problem. Browsers on all platforms suck.
Too true. The AFL live scorecard sucks the memory like it owns it.
The second thing you should do—learn good coding practices. ... Be a part of the solution.
Well said.
hummm, it seems You rather need a no fuss browser- there is the webkit thingy called “browser”, just can’t seem to find the links… also Omniweb can be configured to be very lean…
cheers, mat!-)
found it! http://myownapp.com/downloads/Browser.dmg... it is very “basic” and yet in dev, but HEY, it’s fast!
sorry, http://myownapp.com/downloads/Browser.dmg
I recall reading that PPC apps were coded more in favor of memory efficiency at the expense of some speed, while Intel apps are compiled the other way around (speed over memory efficiency). Also the more CPU cores, the more memory the system uses.
1.25gb RAM is (to this day) almost always “more than enough” on my 12-inch G4 Powerbook (even with many apps running at once), while 1gb on a Mac Pro was making the thing page like crazy with just one application open. From my observations, memory requirements for the same apps running on the Mac Pro without excessive paging was around 3x what was needed in the G4 Powerbook.
For web-browsing, I use the optimized Intel-specific Firefox builds found here: http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/09/19/003355.php In both features and performance, I find it far preferable to any version of Safari.
Ah, you’re right on there. We need more efficient code rather than faster and faster furnace-like CPUs.
Thanks, Mat, I’ll check that out.
Mark, good to hear someone else has noticed this too! I was starting think I mighta been crazy.
9GB of 57GB on my system disk, Benji
I would say that would be a major problem.
On my Powerbook I keep 20GB out of 60 free at all times. When it gets down to 10GB I experience major slowdowns.
Apologies for dual use of major.