Cool Mac Gear

Last month it had to sting when Adobe has posted a Web page linked to an article by Digital Producer Magazine's Charlie White entitled "Mac Slaughtered Again" negatively comparing the graphics performance of PowerMacs vs. Wintel PC boxes. Adobe declared: "The PC outperformed the similar Macintosh machine, at an impressive rate... the PC left the Mac in the dust."

In his article White opined: "Of course, Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP, but if you're spending all day inside After Effects, which operating system you're using makes little difference. What does make a huge difference is if you have to sit and wait for rendering any longer than necessary. And, according to our benchmarks here, if you have an After Effects composite that needs, say, two hours to render on the Mac, it'll take you about an hour and 10 minutes on this PC. So, in addition to the extra $629 you must pay for the Mac, it will cost you plenty of time as well, especially while using After Effects. Time is money. After looking at these startling benchmark results, we have to gaze over at our beautifully-designed Macs and ask, 'Is it worth it?'"

However, White's observations were based on out-of-date Mac hardware, and a benchmark report conducted for Apple by Pfeiffer Consulting concludes that with the adoption of dual processors in all Power Mac G4 models, the hardware now ties together the multiprocessing and networking abilities of Mac OS X v10.2 and Mac OS X Server resulting in impressive performance and productivity gains with Mac OS X v10.2

The aim of the Pfeiffer report is to verify whether the new family of Power Mac G4 systems can deliver significant performance and productivity increases when compared to older Power Mac G4 models, such as the ones White benchmarked against Wintel hardware. Another important aspect of the benchmark project was to verify whether multiprocessing can deliver significant performance increases over single processor architectures.

This benchmark project analyzes the performance and productivity of the 867 MHz, 1.0 GHz, and 1.25 GHz dual processor Power Mac G4s introduced in August, 2002, as compared to the 500 MHz Power Mac G4 introduced in September 1999. Of course the more recently introduced Power Mac dual processor 1.42 GHz machines would enhance performance even more

The eight page report also covers the impact of Mac OS X v10.2 to the "creative markets," noting: “Over time, the new Macintosh operating system will have a profound impact on the way in which creative professionals and publishers work: high-speed networking, preemptive multi-tasking and multiprocessing, combined with a renewed Mac OX X-savvy application environment, profoundly change the everyday reality of ‘getting the job done.’”

Major Findings of the Pfeiffer report include:
• Processing performance in single task processing benchmarks is more than 4 times faster on the 1.25GHz Power Mac G4 than on the reference machine (500MHz Power Mac G4).
• Multiprocessing can increase productivity significantly, especially when running several tasks in parallel.
• Overall productivity in the design and publishing workflow benchmark is almost twice as fast on the new high-end model.
• Gigabit Ethernet yields up to a 6x performance increase in server copy operations over 10/100Base-T networks. Pfeiffer Consulting is an independent technology research institute and consulting operation focused on the needs of publishing, digital content production, and new media professionals.

The report observes that:

"

In the general, when computer users assess the power of their machine, they tend to favor some highly visible aspects, such as the clock speed of the main processor, and usually underestimate other hardware aspects which can be quite as important, such as the speed of the system bus, the performance of the video card or the type of memory used. In reality, a computer is a whole, and the overall performance depends more on the harmonious combination of different hardware and system software features than on one particular aspect."

And of course, the Macintosh has always excelled in the area of elegant integration on hardware and software as a whole concept.

The Pfeiffer continues:

"The new Power Mac G4 is a case in point. There is of course a speed increase of the main processor, but it is the overall architecture, alongside Mac OS X v.10.2, which accounts for the overall speed and productivity of the system. This is especially true for the creative markets: design and publishing productivity relies as much on overall system throughput (and in particular input/output architecture) as it does on pure processing speed. In fact, the most impressive performance increases of the new hardware platform can be observed not so much on purely processor-related tasks, but at levels where all parts of the architecture have to work together. This is the case with some Photoshop performances on large files, where the new high-end Power Mac outperforms the 500 MHz model by a factor of five: The new high-end model takes less than 15 seconds to resample a large image in Photoshop, a task which takes the older machine almost seventy seconds to complete."

The report also notes that OS X's multithreaded Finder takes advantage of nultiprocessing, which further speeds things up by facilitating efficient multitasking, and suggests that this advantage will be accentuated as more software developers pay increased attention to making their application more fully multiprocessing aware.

The key, Pfeiffer maintains, is in the optimization of "creative workflow":

"When Mac OS X was initially announced, it was clear that if the new Macintosh operating system lived up to its promise, it would enable creative professionals and companies to retool their work flow with a much more powerful and stable basis... Today, with the arrival of Mac OS X v. 10.2, and the latest generation of hardware, the new platform has reached maturity, both in terms of system performance and from an application standpoint. As far as the new Power Mac G4 is concerned, there's no doubt that only with Mac OS X will a user benefit from the capabilities of the hardware. This is particularly true for the dual processor architecture now standard on all professional desktop models: With Mac OS 9, the benefit of the second G4 processor is very slim, while Mac OS ex can balance the load of several tasks over both processors....

"In the case of Mac OS ex and the new Power Mac G4 architecture, this means that there is considerable potential for optimizing the creative work flow."

You can download the full Pfeiffer Consulting Benchmark Analysis 2002 Power Mac G4 Benchmark Report in PDF format at:
http://www.pfeifferreport.com
or here.

Memory Leak

From Jon Ashley

Charles,

Just a note about my experiences with the OSX memory leak issue. I've been using Memory Usage Getter on my 17" 800mhz iMac with 1GB of RAM (Oops! Got to remember to pay that shareware fee). I've noticed that just starting PhotoShop will clear out almost 50% of the memory being held up. There's been times I've had nearly 500mb of memory being used (and with nothing running other than OSX) and by the time PhotoShop has launched completely, the memory drops below 300mb. Then when I quit PS, what memory it uses is let go. I haven't noticed this with any other apps. Has anyone else noticed this?

Jon Ashley

Hi Jon;

Very interesting. I don't have PhotoShop, so it's not something I've experienced, but I do find that starting and then quitting programs does seem to free up memory.

Charles

Reasons why NOT to circumvent Mac OS X security

From A Brody

Charles,
Reference your article:
http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2003/04/20030409121259.shtml
about: "Protecting OS 9 System Files In Classic Mode"

There are good reasons not to circumvent Mac OS X security. Especially if booting into Mac OS 9 which should be done rarely if at all on a machine with Mac OS X. Mac OS 9 is not aware of Mac OS X's permissions, and can set much of the operating system on its edge if it is allowed to tamper with the files that must have specific permissions in Mac OS X, or else Mac OS X will cease to run efficiently. One of the primary problems Mac OS X has is when people boot into Mac OS 9 even temporarily, and start moving files around.

Restart into Mac OS X again, you may find the next time you shut down Mac OS X, it won't shut down. The reason? Mac OS 9 caused the permissions of Mac OS X to go askew. Apple has provided in their

Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility application in Mac OS X 10.2, a Repair Permissions button on the First Aid tab, which after selecting the disk in question will repair the permissions to what they are supposed to be. Mac OS X 10.1.5 also has this repair permissions program you can download: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106900

The other problem with booting or working with Mac OS 9 applications on a machine with Mac OS X is that Mac OS X may also not be able to see its own file system anymore. This can be fixed by running the installer CD and using the Disk Utility in the Installer menu, and going to the First Aid tab to Repair Disk. Repair Permissions is there too for Mac OS X 10.2 installer CDs as well, but should only be used if the machine fails to boot off the hard disk, or you are using the same Mac OS X 10.2 version as is found on the CD itself. Permissions have changed with each new Mac OS X 10.2 release.

Once you successfully boot, run repair permissions from the Disk Utility program on your hard disk.

Sincerely,
anonymous

Hi A.

I've been booting back and forth between OS 9 and OS X frequently on this Pismo for a year and a half now and have never encountered any of the problems you cite. OS X is now working better than it ever has. I am smart enough not to use OS 9 to mess with stuff that I can't identify, and I do run the Repair Permissions routine from time to time. It always finds a few things to fix.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear