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UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

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Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#21
post #7

I wish SL were still getting updates, it was the best OS release Apple ever made. It went downhill the moment they went to annual release cycles. I rather wait 2-3 years for a new OS update that is stable, fast, and responsive than dealing with all weird glitches that's turning me off OS X for good. Windows 10 in alpha builds feels better than Lion-Yosemite.

I agree. I stuck with Snow Leopard as long as I could (enough software was no longer compatible). No other mac OS in my experience was as stable (I've been using system macos 7)

I'm always hoping Apple will release the next os with no new features and the requisite performance and stability updates.

My work basically has issued a blanket, don't upgrade to yosemite, but the new app update system seems to always strongly suggest it.

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#22

Yosemite has been a major regression in almost every respect, I actually regret upgrading. Aside from the obvious and major performance and stability issues the major features are just plain broken. For example, try answering your phone from your computer. It takes way too long to actually pick up the call from the phone and then when you try to answer it bugs up so that in the end you can never actually answer the c…

I'm at my wits end with Yosemite. I'm very seriously considering switching to Linux or Windows. Of the numerous problems this OS has, my biggest problem is waking my rMBP from sleep. About 20% of the time, it just doesn't wake up and requires a hard shutdown. I never had that problem with Mountain Lion or Mavericks.

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#23
I've also had lots of problems with Yosemite, but I don't think this comparison is useful at all. The Hackintosh looks like a fresh install with nothing else running, whereas the rMBP has other apps running. When I don't have 100+ Safari tabs open, Yosemite runs a lot better.

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#24
Animation in general is just plain broken in Yosemite (and iOS 8). I'm not up to date with the latest frameworks, but I believe there's been a fundamental API change, because its basically possible to break any animation by just causing an event to happen before its finished. This happens all the time in iOS, you can get it to break mid-rotation and end up in a half and half state: https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672

On OS X, its the same thing. Here's me easily repro-ing in Safari: http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation...

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#25

Yosemite has been a major regression in almost every respect, I actually regret upgrading. Aside from the obvious and major performance and stability issues the major features are just plain broken. For example, try answering your phone from your computer. It takes way too long to actually pick up the call from the phone and then when you try to answer it bugs up so that in the end you can never actually answer the c…

I've always thought of Apple as a marketing company that happens to sell technology, and not a technology company that sells through marketing.

Also the capitalism of today with all of its lust for profits, sales, budgets, and deadlines its kind of luddite, can have a predatory behaviour for innovation and advancements in technology in general.

I think if tech companies want to survive for more than 10/20 years, they will need to get into the core of the system, of THE machine, and figure it out better ways to survive by really delivering good tech and innovation, and not by just promissing a world with rainbows and unicorns

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#26
post #5

Interesting. The flashing at least seems to be an isolated System Preferences bug, as I don't remember seeing it in any other applications. Would be better to compare a larger number of UI interactions - Finder, Safari, Exposé/Mission Control, iTunes, etc., to more clearly establish a pattern rather than just claiming it anecdotally. Not saying the pattern isn't there, but proving it would be a breath of fresh in air…

Tiger didn't have Mission Control, but I certainly think there are other tests that could be done that really compare all aspects of the OS.

I can tell you that Mission Control is, at times (far too frequently) extremely laggy for me on OS X Yosemite. Couple that with apps leaking memory, leaving me with mere megabytes of free RAM, and my top of the line rMBP slows to a crawl.

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#27
I feel like the entire compositor has a performance regression. This includes dragging windows, and seems to have nothing to do with transparency.

When running OS X virtualized inside VMWare Fusion (which does not have hardware accelerated video drivers for the guest), Mavericks was very usable. Yosemite dropped to 2fps (measured using Quartz Debug tools).

I had to use Quartz Debug (available in the Graphics Debug Tools here [1]) to disable beam sync to make it usable again. In VMWare, this takes me from 2fps to around 50fps for basic operations like dragging a window around and typing.

I've observed noticeable improvements disabling Beam Sync in a native environment as well. Unfortunately, I've found no way to do it without leaving Quartz Debug open. Quartz Debug also has an FPS meter in the menu bar under "Window -> FrameMeter". My framerate when dragging a large window in Yosemite with "Beam Sync: Automatic" is around 40fps. With "Beam Sync: Disable" it's almost a steady 60fps.

A stable test in System Preferences for me is the Dock settings.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/downloads/

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#28

You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them: "look, this accelerated release cycle, it's not resulting in quality software. It's hurting our reputation. It's not performing on 2 year old hardware. People are losing faith in our ability to release stable bug-free builds. Users shouldn't have…

I don't even understand who they're competing with by doing yearly updates. It's probably a big scramble to get features released and for what? To beat Windows 8? To beat linux? They don't have any threats when it comes to desktop operating systems, so they should slow down and make some quality updates.

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#29
post #2

That's also what I experienced. Yosemite UI Performance is super slow compared to Mavericks. Maybe by rewriting the UI Code they also got rid of speed optimizations from the Bertrand Serlet era :/

Funny you mention that. I interned at Upthere last summer and got to know Bertrand a bit. We had some good conversations about the NeXT days. I wish I was still there now so I could talk to him about this. I'm sure he has some interesting input since he knows the software inside and out.

Re: UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

#30
This particular issue is probably due to process isolation and sandboxing.

In Tiger, all of those pref panes were loaded into the System Preferences app, and each pane could access all the same data as any other. 3rd party pref panes are supported.

In Yosemite, each of those panes is its own process.

That doesn't excuse it, just saying something about what's going on.

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