Looking at platforms objectively [X4U]

[Kuestner, Bjoern]

> When I finally moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X 10.2 on my G4/450 AGP 

A friend of mine has almost the same hardware (400 MHz G4). On it the GUI
feels much smoother. The limiting factor for window management on low-end
hardware doesn't seem to be the CPU which is fast enough in most cases, but
shuffling RAM contents, because all the window buffering (unless you have
Quartz Extreme) happens in RAM, and that causes a lot of IO. Now my iBook is
terrible in this respect with its 66 MHz bus.

> Though at least one graphically and CPU intensive app that ran just fine 
> under Mac OS 9 didn't under Mac OS X, I took this to be more of an issue 
> with the differences between 9's cooperative multitasking and 10's 
> preimptive multitasking.

If pre OS X apps break under Classic, then it's usually a matter of direct
hardware calls. OS X's Classic environment doesn't allow that.

If pre OS X apps don't run native under OS X they have not been
"carbonized", where Carbon is an API similar to that of the old Mac OS but
some system calls are differently. Developers had to replace some of their
system calls with new version to make older apps run natively (or relatively
so) under OS X.

> I try to turn as many of the "Gee Wiz" effects off, 
> I want maximum performance, not cool tricks.

So do I. But you cannot change the way Quartz works. You cannot turn the GUI
off unless you drop into single user mode and don't run a GUI at all.

Even then, the threading performance issue remains and some of the RAM
issues (see your comment on OS memory footprint OS 7 vs. OS X).

> No, I mean VNC.

But the problem with VNC is almost always limited to network bandwidth from
my practical experience and also theoretical understanding, not OS
performance or RAM or CPU? Even my lowly 500 MHz G3 iBook handles VNC well
as good as the connection (modem to Ethernet) permits.

What's your scenario where you expect VNC to improve on intel hardware? When
you compared VNC on WinXP and the Mac, connecting to a remote Linux box, did
you have the same network connection? And were you using the same VNC server
and settings on the Linux box?

Bjorn




















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