Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 29 Apr 2005 21:59:00 GMT
I installed Tiger over lunch today. I’ll have more to say later, but for now, I just wanted to share this:
I guess that explains why Mail was so slow in Panther–138,000 messages will do that to you. Right now, my poor PowerBook is converting mail, installing the developer tools, and indexing for Spotlight. Hopefully it’ll return to a usable speed once that all finishes.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 05 May 2004 01:32:21 GMT
I co-worker just pointed this out. On my Powerbook (a G4/550, 768 MB, 40 GB 4200 RPM drive), running ‘find /usr’ takes around 30 seconds every time I run it:
tibook$ time find /usr | wc
48402 48402 2390367
real0m30.041s
user0m0.410s
sys 0m2.620s
tibook$ time find /usr | wc
48402 48402 2390367
real0m32.034s
user0m0.450s
sys 0m2.710sOn the other hand, one of my Linux boxes at home isn’t that much faster (Athlon 700, 384 MB, old Maxtor 5 GB drive), but it’s able to do repeated finds much quicker:
debian# time find /usr | wc
124088 124108 5869110
real1m43.631s
user0m0.680s
sys 0m1.170s
debian# time find /usr | wc
124088 124108 5869110
real0m2.090s
user0m0.530s
sys 0m0.700sNotice that repeated finds drop from 103 seconds to 2 seconds on the Linux box, while they stay around 30 seconds on the Mac, even though the Mac has twice the RAM of the PC.
I’m assuming that OS X is restricting the amount of RAM used for disk caching, but it’s really painful in this case.
