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1. Billy Mac Angels
2. Bouncing Billy Mac Os X

Performance

Mac OS X 10.1 is all about performance. That's the hype, anyway. To examine the reality, I delved farther into the seedy underworld of benchmarking than I have in past articles. Let me establish up front that I am just one person with access to two Macs, Mac OS X 10.0.4, 10.1, and a stopwatch. The results described below should only be interpreted as broad indications of the relative performance of Mac OS X 10.1 vs. 10.0.4. They may be not suitable for comparisons between Mac OS X any other operating system, or even between other Macs and the ones I used in the test, due to the huge number of variables between those environments.

Prepare to be seduced and get addicted to one of our most popular games! In the arcade classic of Bouncing Balls, your goal is to form groups of 3 or more balls of the same color so that they can be destroyed. When the game starts, multiple rows of color balls will slowly move downward from the top. A color ball is placed inside the launcher at the bottom of the play area, while the next ball will also be displayed.

A Mac is a reliable machine, but on rare occasions, it might start acting weird or crashing for no apparent reason. You may notice some strange behaviors such as the keyboard not responding normally, lights and indicators not working correctly, or the operating system acting slower than usual. Some apps like VLC, Skype etc. They show up in the dock and starts to bounce, but all they do is keep on bouncing for 1-2 minutes. I started up my Mac in SafeMode and then the applications worked just fine! So i think its some thirdparty application that messes with my apps. Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3) View 14 Replies View. Some apps like VLC, Skype etc. They show up in the dock and starts to bounce, but all they do is keep on bouncing for 1-2 minutes. I started up my Mac in SafeMode and then the applications worked just fine! So i think its some thirdparty application that messes with my apps. Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3) View 14 Replies View. If it still won’t launch I’d repeat the process but instead look inside the ”Preferences” folder instead of ”Saved Application State” and I’d look for the file which doesn’t look like a link or an alias (in this case, com.multimarkdown.composer.mac.plist) and I would copy that file to the Desktop or the Trash, understanding that.

I think these tests work as a way to make broad comparisons between 10.0.4 and 10.1 because, within the context of the testing environment, I tried to make sure the OS version was the only significant variable. I'll be offering my own subjective account of performance as well. These are mostly useful in combination with my performance observations from earlier articles.

Is 10.1 faster than 10.0.4? The answer is a resounding 'yes.' Is it as fast as the hype surrounding its release may lead you to believe? I don't think it is. Let's take a look.

Application Launching

I focused most of my heavy benchmarking on application launching. I did this because it's relatively easy to measure (just try 'measuring' window resize performance), it's likely to be significantly different across OS and application versions (as opposed to something lower-level like integer arithmetic, which presumably will not change that much on the same hardware), and because it was dreadfully slow in 10.0.x.

I measured launch times in two ways. The first, simplest measurement is the now-famous 'bouncemark' score. When an application is launched in Mac OS X, its icon appears in the Dock and then bounces up and down while it's launching. (This animation can be turned off in the Dock preferences, but it's on by default.) This is the most user-visible indication of launch speed.

Of course, it is also one of the most susceptible to trickery. The length of each bounce is variable, making a mere count of the bounces somewhat less useful than you might expect. Also, an application does not stop bouncing when it is actually 'finished' launching, but when it is ready to receive events. By combining the two, one can imagine a slower bounce speed and an ability to receive events earlier in the launch sequence resulting in an application that seems to launch much faster. 'Hey look, it only took two bounces in 10.1, instead of five in 10.0.4!'

This is not all bad, of course. If 10.0 taught us anything, it's that perceived performance is almost as important as actual performance. But to keep the bouncemarks honest, I also tested actual launch time. The stopwatch can't be tricked. Unfortunately, the person operating the stopwatch can! The difficult part about timing an application launch is deciding when the launch is complete.

Obviously, waiting for the application to stop bouncing is not an accurate technique. Even though an application may be receiving my keystrokes, for example, it's not very useful to me until its entire user interface is up and running. The metric I used to pinpoint launch completion was the existence of a complete application UI. If an application creates a new blank document when it starts (like TextEdit, for example), I stopped the stopwatch when that window was fully visible and complete. If an application has a 'main window' (like Mail), I stopped when that window was fully visible and complete. The exact stopping point for each application was different, but the same stopping point was used for each application in each OS version. So the application-to-application times are comparable, but only broad comparisons can be made between different applications, or between the same application on another computer timed by another person. (See, isn't benchmarking evil? :-)

The testing technique was as follows:

1. Arrange all the applications in the Dock, and on the desktop.
2. Reboot and (auto)login as an admin user.
3. For each application in the Dock (ordered as shown in the graphs, from top to bottom), repeat three times:
   • Click the application icon in the Dock and wait for it to finish launching.
   • Quit the application.
4. Repeat three times:
   • Select all the application icons on the desktop and select 'open' from the Finder's file menu to launch all of them simultaneously.

Although I repeated all the launches three times, the graphs only show two times since the third time never varied significantly from the second. All these tests were done on the G3/400, where Mac OS X was installed on the 5,400RPM 12GB hard drive. The tests were done immediately after each OS version was installed, and without any third party software added to the system (other than BBEdit, that is). Let's start with the bouncemarks:

Mac OS X 10.0.4 appears in the blue bars, and 10.1 is in red. Each set of bars includes the first launch on top, and the second launch on the bottom. As you can see, the icons are bouncing a lot less in 10.1. The only application that did not bounce significantly fewer times (especially on the second launch) in 10.1 was the previously maligned Terminal application. iTunes was the most improved, going from a second-launch of eight bounces in 10.0.4 to a mere one bounce in 10.1

But were any of these applications cheating by simply stopping bouncing earlier? Or was 10.1 itself lengthening the duration of each bounce? Have a look at the actual launch times:

The actual times are not quite as impressive as the bouncemarks, but there's still a clear improvement over 10.0.4. There are some puzzles, however. Check out the identical first and second launch times for iTunes in 10.1, which contrasts greatly with the 4-to-1 bouncemark scores in the same OS. I ran the entire 10.1 test cycle again to verify that time, and it turned out about the same. The only difference I could observe was in the amount of hard disk activity I heard.

In general, second launches had a lot less disk activity than first launches. Some applications, like TextEdit, had no discernable disk activity at all on the second launch. Ah, the wonders of caching.

I think almost every application tested stops bouncing earlier in 10.1 than in 10.0.4. Of course, almost every application has changed since 10.0.4 as well. Apple's WWDC session on application launch performance specifically mentioned this 'perceptual optimization', and it appears that Apple's developers (and the MS IE team) are showing the way with the bundled applications.

The applications bundled in 10.1 also seem to incorporate other optimizations mentioned in the WWDC session: deferred loading of application components, decreased extraneous file access, etc. I'm basing this speculation on the apparent decrease in disk activity in 10.1 during application launch.

BBEdit, an application that did not change between OS versions, showed both decreased bouncemarks and launch times, so the OS itself must also be doing something right.

Finally, let's look at the launch times for the simultaneous launch test. (No, I didn't attempt to count the cumulative number of bounces!)

The bottom set of bars, labelled 'Launch All', show how 10.1 fared vs. 10.0.4. The improvement is clear and significant. While observing the bounce-fest of the simultaneous launch, I couldn't help but notice that two applications in particular were still bouncing when the others had long since settled down: Terminal and BBEdit. I decided to try the test without Terminal, and then without both Terminal and BBEdit to see how much the time would improve.

Dropping Terminal saved about 5 seconds, but dropping both cut the times by more than half! The second attempt launched eight application in about nine seconds—not too shabby for a 5,400RPM ATA/33 drive and a 400MHz G3 processor. Clearly, the world would be a better place if more OS X applications launched like Mail and Internet Explorer, and fewer launched like the new Terminal and BBEdit.

As developers update their applications, I suspect the OS X application launch experience will improve steadily. It's already at 'acceptable' levels, in my book. Mac OS 9 is still faster in many situations, particularly on the G3/400. But 10.1 has nothing to be ashamed of (with the possible exception of the new Terminal application, which is slower to launch than it's 10.0.4 counterpart, on top of the bugs described earlier.)

Billy Mac Angels

The 10.1 demos given by Steve Jobs, during which every application he clicks on launches in a single bounce (and less than three seconds), are entirely plausible, given a powerful system with a fast disk, lots of RAM, and a rigorous 'warm-up' session to prime the caches. (Like all magic tricks, software demos are all about preparation ;-)

Bouncing Billy Mac Os X

The bottom line for application launch in 10.1: it's better, and you'll notice.