[X4U] OS X performance issues and memory hog

[B. Kuestner]

This is not a brand new article but at least fairly recent one. I  
generally trust the guys at ars to deliver mostly reliable  
information. Now in here there was one line that caught my attention:

> Here's something that may blow your mind. When Apple compiles OS X  
> on the 970, they use -Os. That's right: they optimize for size, not  
> for performance. So even though Apple talked a lot of smack about  
> having a first-class 64-bit RISC workstation chip under the hood of  
> their towers, in the end they were more concerned about OS X's  
> bulging memory requirements than they were about The Snappy(TM).

Source: <http://arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050710.ars>

Now, if Apple is aware of the problem I hope we can see some  
improvement or at least not things getting worse over time.

In another thread at Ars the slow threading performance of the kernel  
was mentioned ... another core problem of OS X that could provide  
some embarrassment once we see comparisons on almost identical x86  
hardware. I already knew that Apple finally stabilized the kernel API  
with Tiger. But I didn't see the connection until reading this thread  
that Apple now is in the position to rework the kernel as they wish  
without breaking applications and drivers that hook communicate with  
the kernel via the API.

So maybe here, too, there is some reason to hope for improvement.

Björn