Which is faster: Mac OS X or Mac OS 9?

[Phil St. Romain]

NOTE: you can vote without posting a comment to the thread.

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Since the 10.1 update, I've found Mac OS X to be as snappy and responsive as OS 9, and have even run some benchmarks (http://shalomplace.com/osxbench.html) to substantiate this.

Part of the sluggishness issue that many complain about, I'm convinced, has to do with many OS X applications using live resizing for windows instead of outline resizing. The Finder is a good example of live/real-time resizing; Eudora and Appleworks use profile resizing, and feel much more responsive. All Classic apps use profile resizing; don't know how well OS 9 would do with live resizing.

Maybe if more X apps used profile resizing, this perception of sluggishness would be reduced somewhat?

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I would also add here that it's almost never been the case that a major Mac OS upgrade is faster than the previous version. OS 9 ran much slower on my computers than OS 8.1, which is replaced. That OS X would even hold its own would be surprising--and I think it does.

Phil

[Thundarr]

I agree Phil. I think live window resizing is probably a main detraction in speed for OSX, and its absence from OS9 leaves the comparison a little biased. I have noticed that once a folder containing a large number of items (>1000) is opened once in the OSX Finder, the initial scroll though and window resizing is choppy and slow. But after the initial try, if the window is left open, man, is the Finder fast at scrolling and window resizing.

I think the initial slowness is due to the Finder "reading" and "registering" the layout of the window. Once complete and temporarily stored, the Finder doesn't have to go through that process again until the window is closed and re-opened, so it can be super fast. However, on the newer, faster machines (G4, DP800; G4 SP867), the initial slowness just isn't there at all. In fact, I would guess that on the new iMac and new towers OSX will be equally as fast as OS9 in all tasks, even with live window resizing. Just like new hardware has done for every Mac OS.

[Munky]

Os x does some wonderfull multitasking that Os 9 would never be able to handle. It is really great to switch from one program to the next, doing something in the foreground while another program is chomping in the background and not noticing a performance difference-try that in OS 9 and it really begins to grind. It would be nicer if finder was a quicker- booting back into Os 9 just shows how slow Os x can be for general 'snappiness'.

More to the point the programs need to be faster. Office vX is sluggish and VPC5 is like walking through a foot of mud. I haven't tried Illustrator 10 yet and would like to know what people think of that. Alot of people that I work with won't even upgrade to illustrator 9 because they find it really slow compaired to illustrator 8.

[peepster]

Thundarr, I agree in general with your post,
however I really think that there should be an option to turn the Aqua frills off so that people with slower machines can still have a fast GUI experience. I would love a dual 1GHz G4 machine and I'm sure OS X would run fast but unfortunately for the next year or so all I will have is my 4 month old white iBook.. my first Apple which I bought because of OS X. I think the fancy bits of Aqua are great, but you really should be able to turn them off.

[Spiff]

Give MacOS X a gob of RAM (say 2Gb), fast HDs, and Dual Processors (450) and it is suddenly an incredibly useful system. It may not out-benchmark OS 9 in some respects, but the *useability* of OS X when doing multiple concurrent tasks at once (video compression, photoshop batches, iTunes burning, web browsing etc etc) is leagues above OS 9. Now to get all my apps running under OS X (Carbon/Cocoa/Posix) and I'll be a very happy camper.

[Spiff]

Give MacOS X a gob of RAM (say 2Gb), fast HDs, and Dual Processors (450) and it is suddenly an incredibly useful system. It may not out-benchmark OS 9 in some respects, but the *useability* of OS X when doing multiple concurrent tasks at once (video compression, photoshop batches, iTunes burning, web browsing etc etc) is leagues above OS 9. Now to get all my apps running under OS X (Carbon/Cocoa/Posix) and I'll be a very happy camper.

[rstilley]

My OS X experience is *almost* as fast as OS 9, now that I have installed a PowerLogix G4/500 MHz upgrade into my PowerBook Lombard (to replace a stock daughtercard with a failed L2 cache, which made things horrible, as you can imagine.)

I have 512 MB of RAM, and the only thing that still lags is Window Resizing.

Well, I have to add 2D and 3D acceleration, and QuickTime movie playback, since Apple is refusing to support our chips....

Otherwise, very snappy, fluid performance.

Cheers.

--R

[Electric Sheep]

OS X lets me get more done in a shorter timespan. The multi-tasking is absolutely incredible. I'm MUCH more efficient sitting in front of OS X now as compared to OS 9.

Considering that I'm usually doing half-a-dozen things at once, it's nice not to have to wait for something to finish before I can move on to the next task.

Also...actually doing something in a native app is practically the same speed as doing the same thing in OS 9 (e.g. rotate an image in PS 7 for OS X -vs.- PS 6 for OS 9).

2¢

[edlake]

Phil:

OS X seems faster to me. I never open windows and never re-size them. In fact, sometimes I close windows that open from inserted disks. I have two open windows on the desktop, both in column view and use those to navigate my system. Also, I never close applications except Mail and Omniweb when I'm not online. Since I'm still on dialup I don't need them except when I log on.

BTW, Rob suggested the two column windows in an early hint and I've been using it ever since. I think too many people have tried to do things the old way and haven't explored other ways of doing things that X offers.

[baryonyx]

I expected Mac OS X to really fly on my dual-450 G4. By rights, since it takes full advantage of the second processor and OS 9.x does not, Mac OS X should be significantly faster.

Sadly, this has not been the case. At best, Mac OS X is as fast as OS 9.1 on the same machine. At worst it's much slower. Finder performance is acceptable; I've never had the trauma that the Multitudes have over there on MacFixIt. On the other hand, doing a large-scale search-and replace in BBEdit is significantly slower In X vs. 9.x. Screen redraws in InDesign are so slow they're quite annoying. They're slow anyway in OS 9.x. but in X they're much worse.

The only thing that mitigates this slightly is multitasking. I can go off and do something else while I wait 2 minutes for that search-and-replace to happen in BBEdit, but it better not be scrolling through an InDesign doc because multitasking does nothing to mitigate that. And I keep asking myself this: I have two processors working together now--how come I'm not blown away by the speed?

It's very disappointing because it seems like perhaps that second processor is being used to simply catch up with OS 9.

Andy

[Phil St. Romain]

Sorry to hear about your experiences, Andy!

I've noticed that some X apps are slower than in OS 9 as well, but on the whole, things are faster especially when multi-tasking is considered. Of course, if I spent most of my day on InDesign, I'm sure I'd be singing a different song.

I hope they do a better job with Golive, which I just forked out my money for. It's slow enough on Classic. Anyone using a Beta version.

E.Sheep, what's the speed like on Photoshop 7?

[baryonyx]

Phil, it's a rare day that I can actually tear off a coherent post, and that was one of my more intelligible ones; however, I think it came off a bit more negatively than I intended.

While I am very disappointed that my dual-processor G4 is not running circles around OS 9.1--that's why I bought a dual-processor Mac, dag nabit!--I'm not so bitter that I'm going to let it ruin my experience. To the contrary: I haven't had so much fun since the switch from System 6.08 to System 7, and that was fun.

Andy

[griffman]

I'm headed to a computer store this weekend; I want to see OS X on the new dual 1ghz machines! :-)

-rob.

[Phil St. Romain]

Rob and Andy,

I got to play with one of the dp 1 g machines today with a mega flat screen monitor--gorgeous set-up at our local Mac retailer. Quite fast; window resizing is no problem at all. I didn't really do much with software; just played around in the Finder.

Phil

[baryonyx]

I actually have an Apple store within 30 minutes of my house. I've been meaning to pop over there and check out the new iMacs, particualrly the high-end machine.

Gotta control myself, though. Taking the family to Disney World in November and if you've ever been, you know how they essentially hook up a virtual vacuum cleaner to your wallet. It's always an amazing experience to be sucked dry for cash and feel somehow glad of it. Kind of analogous to buying a computer, really.

Andy

[lerkfish]

(thread drift) We went to Disney world last year, flew, only stayed two days in the park because the travel agent messed us up (had us arriving and departing on two of the 4 park ticket days), stayed inside the park and spent a MINT!.
This year, we are driving, staying in a VERY nice hotel (sheraton) outside the park, using their shuttle, paying for the SAME four day park hopper tickets, but being able to use all four days, and our projected costs are going to be about one third less, even with the extra hotel costs on the way. You may want to check out different options to save cash (/thread drift)

On OSX speed, it seems to me faster in most operations finder-wise. Where it feels sluggish are with certain programs...the killer is IE or any web browser. I personally think this is what has really colored people's perceptions on sluggishness the most, even if unconsciously so. Also, some programs just aren't optimized apparently (I have freehand 10, but there's no speed gain from using freehand 9 in classic...and there SHOULD be).

Otherwise, I find on the rare occasions when I boot into 9, I think "oh, that was fast" when I do SOME things, but then I hit some speed bump and think "can't wait to get back to OSX".

[DSHwrd]

Well, to be truthfully honest...

I don't remember what OS 9 feels like. I haven't been in it for about a month or so now. I use classic whenever needed.

I think they're about even, but do to multitasking, OS X is faster and better, in my opinion.

[pkap]

Andy, I've got a dual 450 G4 also, and installed X about a week ago. To me it seems much more responsive than 9, when X-native apps are used (are you using BBEdit [Lite] for X?) but Classic apps are slightly slower -- using PictureViewer, I used to be able to open a couple of dozen downladed images for review in about 2 seconds, now it takes upwards of 10 seconds to open that many. We'll just have to wait until X versions are available -- reminiscent of the switch to Power PC a few years ago, when 68K apps ran a bit slower because of the emulation.

How much RAM do you have? I bought lots when prices bottomed out a few months ago, from what I've read it can make quite a difference in responsiveness. I also installed X on its own partition on a new HD.

[baryonyx]

Peter, I have 640MB of RAM. Somehow I think that's gotta be enough to get this beast moving at at least 1.x the speed of OS 9 on my DP 450, but it's just not the case for me in Illustrator, InDesign and most tellingly, BBEdit. A script full of search-and replace routines in BBEdit that flies in OS 9 merely chugs along in X.

Andy

[edlake]

Illustrator is slow in either 9 or X. At least versions from 9 on. If I need speed I boot Classic and run Illustrator 8.

Adobe just released 10.0.1 today. I'll try it out to see if there are any speed improvements.

[bahamutX]

I find that Classic is faster than X in gaming. I don't know if it's the same to you people?

Other than that, I think that OS X is much faster that classic in lots of things.

[RacerX]

For most of the things I do, Mac OS X is fast enough. Yes games (like Unreal Tournament) play faster in Mac OS 9 than in Mac OS X. But the combination of the features that I like and being able to use most of my old apps in Classic means that the main reason for rebooting into Mac OS 9 for me is now games (and VPC, specially for Solaris which was already slow in Mac OS 9, but hardly moves in Mac OS X).

On a side note, my Rhapsody powered PowerBook is strikingly fast. And what few games there are (I play the native Quake II in Rhapsody) play great. Blue Box is also amazingly fast (considering the speed of Classic)... but I think I would rather have the rootless Classic than the VPC-like Blue Box.

[Mikey-San]

For the most part, I find few things to be horribly slower in X than in 9, unless it's right after a boot (which I rarely do these days, what with instant-on wake-from-sleep and logging out).

But let's look at an interesting statistic:

I moved from the old versions of the Mac OS (7-9) to OS X in September of last year. Since then, I've had only three complete system crashes, and none of those have come within the last five or six months. I believe two of them were I/O related, and whatever bug caused them doesn't seem to be around anymore.

Occasionally, I'll have to kick out to single-user mode (sudo shutdown now) and come back to multiuser mode, but it's rare that I do a real, complete restart for anything other than going into 9 to play some video games.

I get more stuff done in a shorter amount of time because of things like this.


-/-
Mikey-San

[petey]

don't get me wrong. i love X, and wouldn't go back to using 9 as my main os for all the tea in china.

but 9 is faster.

X may be better for 17 different reasons, which i could expound at length over a beer.

but 9 is faster.

[chug]

If a program has been ported to OS X, and ported well. It should be good. Ive got a 800Mhz G4 with 512 Meg O Ram and it works wonders. You can see the speed of compiling when you use fink. It is fast.

But some GUI apps are slow, you'll get a few and then some that work really nicly.

10.2 should so a big improvment what qith Quartz and all. Just look at IE 5.2. Its a lot quicker than 5.1 :)

[9KILLER]

10.2 should so a big improvment what qith Quartz and all.

It is. I was happy with the performance of 10.1.x on my Cube 450, but now I'm thrilled with the performance of 10.2.

[T_Rex123]

On a Rev A iMac with a graphics card that OS X does not support, OS 9 is definitely faster. I use OS X though because it is more functional all around.

tim

[puffynet]

What's the point? OS X is rock solid, powerful. OS 9 may indeed be "faster" but it crashes big time. Just like Windoze. I prefer a stable and intelligent OS.;)

[sbur]

I took the plunge and upgraded to 10.2 this weekend. (Thank G-d for this forum...took a while to get the unix stuff running again)

I have to say that 10.2.1 on my 600 MHz iBook, it runs as 9. The multithreaded finder is the best. Application launch is increadiblt fast now, and I have't been noticing any of the sluggishness that some apps displayed in 10.1x.

So, now I say that X is as fast as 9, faster if you consider the multitasking!

[T_Rex123]

What I would like to know, out of curiosity, is if Jaguar will be a speed improvement or slow up the Macs, like the Rev A iMac, which have an unsupported graphics card?

Let me know, if anyone dared to find out yet!

tim:rolleyes:

[9KILLER]

10.2 has a definite speed advantage over 10.1 on a Beige G3 266 that I have at the office. It's a decent little box when it has OS X on it. It's totally useable. I just wouldn't want to try Quake III or a large Photoshop file on it.

On a mildly related note: I recently discovered that some of my older games now have OS X versions. I've installed quite a few in the last few days, and found that they all are playing faster on Jag than OS 9 on my Cube. No doubt about it. OS 9 had a slight performance edge on 10.1 games, but Jag is smoother than either. It's been awhile since I've booted 9, but I know they've never been this smooth, before.

Aliens vs Predator™
Quake3
Giants (X only)
Unreal Tourney
Wolfenstein SP
Elite Force 1.1.1
GLQuake
Warcraft III

(Can you tell I like first-person shooters?)