MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design? • Hacker News Board

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#571

Post by crazygringo » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

defnotashton2 wrote: post #485

crazygringo wrote: post #417

I'm so confused about the comments here. There are a bunch of people who can't reproduce the slowness at all, but nearly all downvoted or you have to wade through 100's of comments to get to them. The majority of comments are just dumping on Macs, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article, and seem to be blindly assuming it's true. And I can't seem to find any substantive discussion of whether this is…

Op linked validated bug reports.. One of which Apple responded with "by design" of which op derived the title. The down votes are because it seems pretty clear that the people who don't experience have long lived instances of their os and likely have grandfathered or disabled security settings. There are a lot of people saying ita pretty easy to replicate with a new os. And it is, I just did it. Did you?

No they didn't, there's no link. They said it's "FB7674490" but Googling that reveals nothing, so I can't read it.

I don't know what the bug report said, or what specifically was by design. Surely "the entire machine freeze for 1-2 seconds every 10th minute, not to mention everything just being sluggish" is not by design.

And I was unable to replicate it (I was one of the comments that got downvoted), although I don't have the luxury of trying a fresh OS. I haven't disabled any security settings, and I don't know what would have been grandfathered -- that's not mentioned anywhere in the article as a factor.

So that's what's bothering me -- the assumption that contradictory evidence isn't valid while the original post somehow is, and no discussion around that, or what tradeoffs there might be.

Now, finally, there are actually some substantive comments from people testing it. There wasn't before though, and it's still unclear as to whether this really is bad design, a wise tradeoff, or if the author's machine has something else going on. Because their experience of a frustratingly slow Mac is just not the norm at all.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#572

Post by sixstringtheory » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #47

davidvartan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: downloading Xcode, this page has saved me hours: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10335747/how-to-download... . It's just a list of direct links to each version of Xcode at apple.com. Mystery why Mac App Store downloads still can't be bulletproof after all these years.

I actually prefer the App Store approach because that way the majority of my updates are in one place and can be done automatically in the background. The problem is that it used to work fine and they managed to break it.

I usually keep at least one prior release of Xcode on my machine, up to the latest patch for its series. So right now I have 11.5 and 11.4.1. I've hit so many problems with new versions in the past. I wish I could just let MAS handle it for me, but it's just never been an option, aside from the issues it has actually working.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#573

Post by stephc_int13 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

Wow, this is incredible and clearly a huge step in the wrong direction.

I clearly won't switch to their system anytime soon...

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#574

Post by tinco » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #568

tinco wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you run the test yourself? Why do you assume people are blindly assuming it's true? For me first run was 0.5s, second run was 0.004s, so there's definitely something going on.

I did. It got downvoted with no replies. I don't have any security settings changed or anything. First and second run were both around 0.005s. That's why I wrote this new comment, in the hopes that maybe it would be seen.

Weird. I just noticed that the difference was only the very first time I ran that test. After that the second one was only 100% faster than the first one. That could easily be explained by filesystem / caching things.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#575

Post by FullyFunctional » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

glofish wrote: post #334

soraminazuki wrote: post #278

Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading. As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possibl…

IMHO the original choice of the path seems incredibly ill-advised and the main burden lies with the original developers. sometimes old errors and mistakes come back and bite

Why are you apologizing for Apple? I too have always had my own path in / (/u for my NFS mounted homes). I guess I just learned of yet another reason I will never go to Catalina (or buy any more macOS hardware).

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#576

Post by nightowl_games » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #74

inimino wrote: post #42

It looks like my time with MacOS is rapidly coming to an end. Any Linux distro recommendations these days?

https://www.linuxmint.com/ It's ubuntu without the bullshit monitization.

And with a better default DE

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#577

Post by Wowfunhappy » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #546

kitsunesoba wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to outdated ports, several times I had issues with macports mucking with or otherwise interfering with the system-bundled copies of things which was a real headache. Seems like the ideal setup would be something like Homebrew, except it "lives" in the ~/Library/Brews/ folder or something to that effect.

Homebrew does this far more often. MacPorts is off in its own world in /opt/local, which is actually mildly inconvenient sometimes because a lot of things won't pick it up when you want them to.

Tiny typo that confused me, I think you mean:

> a lot of things won't pick it up when you want them to.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#578

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #537

kar1181 wrote: post #27

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work. Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

We're moving away from general purpose computing, and Apple is one of the greatest forces in this. Also, they are a threat to a free market for software, as they regulate their walled garden with arbitrary rules and skim off a lot of value. I honestly don't understand why a large portion of developers have so much love for Apple. I'm personally a proud owner of a desktop PC with an ASUS motherboard. It serves me fine…

Because for those of us that care about graphics and selling desktop applications, it is mostly Apple, Google or Microsoft platforms.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#579

Post by WillPostForFood » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #301

zeroimpl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall windows 95/98 being pretty slow to boot. I also recall being warned by teachers not to move the mouse while things were booting as that would allegedly slow things down further. These days the only real time I wonder "wtf is this thing doing" is when I'm waiting about 5-10 seconds for my mac to wake up from sleep.

Win 95 and its descendants had legendary poor boot times. Things finally improved with XP, but W3.1x and W95 were anything but fast - unless you were playing Solitaire.

Here is a Pentium 200Mhz starting Win95, only about 20 seconds from "Starting Windows 95" to the login screen. 40 seconds including the full powerup/BIOS sequence. Not too bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwRR7-P-8fc

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#580

Post by monadic2 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

VonGuard wrote: post #553

kccqzy wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCSP is Online Certificate Status Protocol, generally used for checking the revocation status of certificates. You used to be able to turn it off in keychain access, but that ability went away in recent macOS releases.

Ah, Apple. When you can no longer innovate, just start removing features and call it simplicity...

Honestly I'm trying to think of a reason you would WANT to disable OCSP, I'm having enough problems thinking of more than 2 developers I know who can actually articulate how it works enough to evaluate this. Not that it's complicated—it's just mostly invisible.

Even when OCSP is a problem, generally you're more worried about issuing a new certificate than an immediate workaround. What are you going to do, ask all your customers to go into keychain access to work around your problem?

This behavior of slowing down appears to be because apple is making HTTPS connections apparently synchronously (probably unnecessarily) and you'd only be potentially harming yourself by disable OCSP.

Though, I am often frustrated FLOSS desktops and Windows don't allow the behavior I want—maybe this is just cultural.