“I installed OS X10.3 over a month ago and have begun to get to grips with most of the changes from 10.2.x (Jaguar). Some I like _ but not all. One improvement with 10.2.3 was better memory management. I had been running close to the limits but now have a reasonable amount spare in normal operating conditions.” Read the article at BangkokPost.
Getting to Grips with Mac OS X Panther
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
This article has been written by someone who makes statements without elaboration. The worst is: “one improvement with 10.2.3 was better memory management. I had been running close to the limits but now have a reasonable amount spare in normal operating conditions.”
Limits of what? Disk, or physical memory?
If disk, then how big was his disk drive?! And did he ever consider freeing up some space on his startup drive?!
And if it is memory, what’s so bad about a kernel that uses as much memory as it has to its disposal?! The memory is a resource best USED, not left free to waste. On UNIX-based operating systems, I’d expect that there should be NO free memory left if the kernel is making good use of it.
This guy needs to be much more careful about what to say and how to say it in his reviews. Don’t bother reading… you’re better off making your own conclusions.
Good point about the memory, Tony. Technically Mach has no memory limit for applications. You can open an unlimited number of apps without seeing any real slowdown.
It says at the bottom that this guy teaches at an engineering school. I would hate to be in his class seeing as he obviously doesn’t know much about what he’s doing. For one, he never mentioned any hardware specs, which seems like something a techie would’ve listed in a tech article. The other thing that got me was when he talked about not being able to put the trash in the sidebar, but using the actions button as a workaround. Usually this wouldn’t be a bad thing to say, except that he also mentioned the new toolbar. The toolbar in Panther (as well as Jag) has a delete button in it. You highlight what you want in the trash and instead of dragging it, you click the delete button. He could’ve saved himself a few steps there, and it’s not exactly a power user tool when all the application toolbars function the same way.
Why post an article that has the technical merit of what a 5 year old might write? The really funny part was the technical description of journaling and the remark about needing third party software to turn it on in Jaguar (not true, use diskutil).
Very little in this article is true and I am starting to feel that as long as an article talks about Apple in a golden light it’s posted to OS News. There are plenty of high quality articles about Panter to have overlooked this one. Articles written by people who do not know what they are talking about are better off left unknown, not spread at popular news sites!
Come on guys, be more careful about spewing comments that you can open “any amout of apps” without slowdown. This is crazy. This is completely dependent on the fact that EVERY application you open is 100% idle, not balancing between sleep/run states and not being used. This very rarely happens. There might not be a ceiling but just like Jaguar, you can run out memory, including virtual, start swapping and slow down to the pace of a turtle if you open too many applications in Panther.
Is that it 404?
“Come on guys, be more careful about spewing comments that you can open “any amout of apps” without slowdown. This is crazy. This is completely dependent on the fact that EVERY application you open is 100% idle, not balancing between sleep/run states and not being used. This very rarely happens. There might not be a ceiling but just like Jaguar, you can run out memory, including virtual, start swapping and slow down to the pace of a turtle if you open too many applications in Panther.”
Well lets test that. I’m running a TiBook 867, with 768 MB of RAM. To test this, I now have open 45 applications, including the whole Adobe CS, Studio MX 2004, Final Cut Pro 4, DVD Studio Pro 2, all of iLife, iTunes is playing a song, and FCP is rendering a short videio clip. As I am typing this the only noticable slowdown is when switching to and from FCP. I love Mach.
This is the same guy who slammed Cocoa a few months ago and was ripped to shreds on several message boards, e.g.
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/13/1512234&mode=thread
The link mentions a rebuttal on iDevGames but that site has been down
for awhile. So is the Bangkok Post for that matter.
The guy is building a rep for writing half-arsed articles.
You must have some super HW specs. I notice a definite slowdown when I have enough applications open, especially if they’re computationally intensive. Sometimes it takes several seconds for Exposé to notice I’ve clicked to see all windows.
Admittedly, I don’t have super amounts of memory available.
“Well lets test that. I’m running a TiBook 867, with 768 MB of RAM. To test this, I now have open 45 applications, including the whole Adobe CS, Studio MX 2004, Final Cut Pro 4, DVD Studio Pro 2, all of iLife, iTunes is playing a song, and FCP is rendering a short videio clip. As I am typing this the only noticable slowdown is when switching to and from FCP. I love Mach.”
Leave all that open for two days. Come back next tomorrow and tell me if performance is still stellar.
” Well lets test that. I’m running a TiBook 867, with 768 MB of RAM. To test this, I now have open 45 applications, including the whole Adobe CS, Studio MX 2004, Final Cut Pro 4, DVD Studio Pro 2, all of iLife, iTunes is playing a song, and FCP is rendering a short videio clip. As I am typing this the only noticable slowdown is when switching to and from FCP. I love Mach.”
I actually open every app I can find to stress test systems at work before I roll them out, very much like what you do and leave the system running over night with at least 4 or more apps doing something.
In my experience dual processor systems stay very responsive and single processor G4s are fine as long as they have more than 512MB of RAM.
I can’t leave this laptop running for 2 days because I bring it around with me, but I will try it on an eMac.
When I first had OS X 10.1, I opened every single app that was installed on my dual G4-500. The system was still pretty responsive and closing/re-launching apps was still speedy. I could not do the same on my faster P4 office computer.
Well, I can run several Quicktime movies, have iMovie and iPhoto open (and doing stuff), use Safari, open the Finder and run Appleworks; not to mention have three active users logged in on my 1GHz G4 eMac with 640MB RAM….no problems at all.
Panther is solid!!!
Like the writer before me I have a eMac 1GHz too, but with only 384MB ram and it’s ticking like a clock when I’m downloading my e-mails, downloading photos from my digital camera, ripping a cd i iTunes and surfing the web and at the same time it’s a Quicktime movie running in the dock!
I left Windows/Linux/x86 and got my first Mac 2 months ago and I ain’t looking back! The exposure function in Panther is a mean machine too. >:-)
MacOSX is a strange cat. I’ve seen MacOSX systems of modest configuration play that humongous Matrix Reloaded full screen trailer and play two other Quicktime movies and have 10 or more apps open and still run DNET.
Other times I’ve seen it chock on trying to find an SMB share on the network while doing nothing much of anything else.
Overall I have been very pleased and impressed with Panther. If they can eliminate that beach ball of death I will be really happy.
Hasn’t been two days yet, but it’s been something like 8 hours so far and I just used it…not a hitch.
BTW, test machine is a 700 MHz eMac with 640 MB RAM and 10.3.2 installed. The only things I’ve done to alter the factory settings were 1)added RAM, and 2) took out the combo drive and put in a superdrive.
Well it’s been more than a day now and no problems.
Two days and still running strong.