??-How Fast is FAST-?? I need mo' speed in my 933 G4-!

Forgive me for being dense, but I just have to ask: what do I have to do
get my Macintosh (G4, 1 GB RAM, 933 Mz, OSX 10.2) to be as quick as
the DELL work station I use at the local community college-? It's
faster than I can blink. (And the DELL costs 1/3 as much, but that's
another matter...)

I have been a Mac guy from the beginning, owned several; I updated to a
G4 three years ago and have finally embraced OSX; I plan to upgrade to
Panther when I can get a few $$. All in all, this is a pretty stable
machine and doesn't crash like the old RISC machines, but lately I have
seen a LOT more of that Spinning Beach Ball of Death. And it's SLOW.

I have run the Apple disk tools, new Disk Warrior; my HD is a 60 GB; I
have used 21 gigs. I regularly fiddle around with the UNIX root screen,
employing the "fsck -Y" diagnostic tool.

While using Photoshop, it's disappointingly slow and squirrely lately. I
gave up on the Mail program; it has never worked, even in Jaguar.

SO-----as I said, I am a little dense--the Macs of old were simply magic
and required little attention--my old 8500 was a real prize (and as
quick as my G4, due to its Daystar chip). What am I failing to do to
get performance out of this G4-?

Thanks, and sorry to be so whiny--

buzz

 

I don't know how "fast" that Dell is, but you should not have any of the
problems you're describing with your Mac. Are you running the
daily/weekly/monthly cron scripts? Have you re-prebound your files?
Permissions OK? Disk journaling enabled?

I suggest you get a utility like Xupport or Cocktail (check them out at
e.g. www.versiontracker.com). If any of those won't help, there must be
something up with your system.

 

Well, the first thing I would do would be to upgrade to Panther (10.3.4
is current). I saw a significant performance improvement on my G3
PowerBook, G4/400, and iMac 800MHz when I made that move last year.

Even under Jaguar, though, (where you should be at 10.2.8, btw) the
situation you describe is atypical. I also have a 2.8GHz Pentium IV (I
need it for cross-platform books I write and edit) and the performance
difference between my iMac and the Pentium are minor, particularly in
Photoshop: some things are actually a trifle faster on the iMac (mostly
computational activities, like gradient fills) while most are faster on
the Pentium, at more than 3x the clock speed.

BTW, the G4 died a few weeks back and I bought a dual 2GHz G5 a little
earlier than I had planned -- the Pentium doesn't come close to that
baby on anything I do other than things that are too fast to measure on
either machine.

 

To buy more RAM?

Greg Shenaut

 

Computers balance for three resources--memory, CPU, and I/O. Find where
the bottleneck is in your system--it's probably either memory or CPU.
There's not much you can do to improve I/O without buying a newer
machine.

I don't know what options there are to upgrade to a dual CPU system or
faster processors, but as BuZzy mentioned, buying more memory is
probably a cheaper solution. 1 GByte total or more would give you lots
of head room to run applications without swapping.

And start saving your money for another system. You may have to upgrade.
Or live with the performance you got.

 

Thanks for the responses, guys--

I just upgraded the G4 to 1024 Megs, and I can notice more smoothness
hauling around a 256 M Photoshop file, but it stops to "catch up," I
guess, with the beach ball just spinning. I'm trying to open few aps at
one time to manage memory better. I'm certain there is a critical
setting or adjustment I have overlooked.

Danny mentioned:
....daily/weekly/monthly cron scripts?
....Have you re-prebound your files?
....Permissions OK?
....Disk journaling enabled?

Oh, man--I must admit my ignorance here--I think the "permissions" are
simply set for all to get on--not an office or server deal. I guess it's
time for me to get educated.

I dunno--I mean, my machine is, afer all, the most jazzed up Macintosh I
have used, so I have no basis of reference. I read all sorts of
accounts of Macs that are just lightning fast with no pauses--I have to
wonder (and I am not a tech head): does 133 Mhz bus speed limit things-?

The three slots in my board only allow 1.5 Gigs of memory. I'd love
to get one of those sexy G5's but they are not cheap and I'm poor right now.

thanks again----buzzy

 

BuZzY,

The cron scripts will remove/swap the junk files that OSX creates. The
system is designed to do this automatically at night, but that means
you'll need to have the machine running. It's also something Apple has
kept pretty secret, which is hard to understand. If you don't run the
scripts, these junk files will build up and slow down the box a lot.
With a utility like Cocktail or Xupport, you can run them when you wish.

Prebinding is kind of an optimization (which some utility apps prefer to
call it). It's usually done by OSX automatically when e.g. installing a
new app. But re-prebinding your system will also usually increase speed
a lot.

Each little file has its ownership and permissions. Unfortunately, they
might change here and there as time goes on. If you don't run a script
to check/fix them on a regular basis, your machine will get a bit
flakier/slower.

Disk journaling is not really improving the speed of the system per se.
It's a "recording" of the system preferences and set-up and will make
the machine boot faster - in particular in case you've shut it down with
the "panic button" or had a power cut.

Xupport will fix all the above for you. Cocktail, too (but I'm not sure
it'll help you enable disk journaling, though). Both also ships with
other features, i.e. a few hacks for the dock, to force empty trash,
etc. You *must* get one of them - or a similar.

BTW: There are several sites designated to help you maintain and/or
speed up your Mac, not least www.macfixit.com and www.xlr8yourmac.com.
But also, take a look at www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html - a gem for
people on Jaguar. Last but not least: upgrade to Panther (faster) or at
least 10.2.8

HTH

D

 

Thanks again----I just downloaded and installed a trial copy of
Xupport--now I have to figger it out--things have really advanced since
the days of my old IIx (the damned thing cost 4 grand in 1990-!)

bed time

BuZzY

 

I use Xupport myself. If you have any Q, just ask and I'll be happy to
help as much as I can. O rbetter yet: Use its excellent "help" files.

Good luck and post back to tell how it goes!

D

 

The problem is not at all about your processor type or speed, you are
very likely just consuming more RAM than you have, therefore using the
disk for a sorry imitation of RAM.

How are your Photoshop memory/history settings? If the total RAM in your
machine is 1024MB, you cannot avoid swapping, and therefore, delays,
when running Photoshop with the default settings and working with files
that are 1/4 your total RAM in size. This is true with any machine
running Photoshop under Windows just as well. The default history
setting is 10 states plus "automatically create first snapshot". This
means that after 10 operations, Photoshop will have not only one, but
_twelve_ different versions of a file stored in either RAM, or if
there´s not enough of that, on disk, for undo´s. Multiply this by the
number of open documents in Photoshop, and you can easily see how much
you need RAM for a single document. In your case, 256x12 with stock
settings is 3GB per document, so no wonder it feels slow. Add something
like 512 or 768 for the OS and Photoshop, and if you have any other
programs running, something for them and their documents. There are not
a that many stock desktops on the current market that can handle files
that size without hitting the disk with Photoshop´s default settings.

What you can do (besides maxing out your RAM or getting a machine with
4GB or more RAM) is:
-Set the history states to a minimum (and learn to make no mistakes ;] )
-Disable automatic creating of first snapshot, because that means it
will create the snapshot _when the file is opened or created_, and when
that data is pushed to disk, it will be just as fast or slow to refetch
it as it would be to just use File > Revert on it.
-Allocate as much memory as possible for Photoshop, even if that means
swapping all your other open programs with their open documents to disk,
and try to avoid jumping between programs when working with those 256MB
files. Else, every time you move outside Photoshop, it will have to
swapped, causing a noticeable delay.
-Work with only one such a document at a time, as keeping another one
waiting in the background will also consume RAM.

..lauri

 

Yes, they will. At 3:15 a.m. if I don't remember wrong.
Disclaimer: I have always shut off my boxes at night and have never
experienced this myself, only read it somewhere and through a friend who
had a noisy G4 that woke up the family each night.

But you should get one of those small and relatively cheap system
utilities like Xupport, Cocktail or SystemOptimizerX. They're good to
have anyway.

 

No. Nothing runs if the processor is sleeping.

--
There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3
7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF

 

Then I'm glad I added that disclaimer in my previous post.
Mea culpa. My assumption was wrong.

 

no, they won't.