Saturday, November 18, 2006
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is a CPU hog
My 800Mhz G4 PowerMac (which Apple fans claim is the equivalent of a 1600Mhz Pentium 4) is running extra slow. It was already slow enough as it is. The hard disk was formatted and Tiger installed only a week ago. The apps I have running now are: Safari 2, FireFox 2, Terminal, and of course the Finder. I've only got a dozen tabs open in my browsers but 'top' is telling me my CPU is constantly being used. The idle time is consistently less than 50% - in other words, the CPU usage is constantly above 50% so everything is slow and LAGGY as hell even though I have 1GB of memory in here.
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Obviously newer OSes and their additional features will demand more of hardware than older simpler OSes. if you do a...
top -o cpu
...I think you'll see that the TOP process itself is taking a great chunk of CPU time as its constantly updating. Also note in TOP that there are *many* processes running (not only open GUI apps). you might be seeing OSX doing many background maintenance tasks (indexing volumes for Spotlight, maintaining open Dashboard widgets. Remember that you're running the lastest OS on a (up to) 4 year old machine, there has been many OS updates since this mac shipped as well as two architecture transitions. For it to run as well as it can it'd appreciate even more RAM and a good fast disk. ensure you've a nice big clear slab of boot volume available for your swapfile (or try running that on another volume), get more RAM, switch off Spotlight caching, turn off some GUI animations / Dashboard if speed is crucial or run an earlier simpler OS (X.3 9 was pretty good) on this older machine. Enjoy the functionality of milking every bit of use from slightly older hardware but don't expect them to feel spritely forever.. :) Joe
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