Why OS X is slow: a developer's perspective

Andrew Welch, President of Ambrosia Software and a developer of Snapz Pro, has published a thoughtful perspective on the state of Mac OS X that also includes speculation on the near future. A few brief excerpts:

"I believe that Apple understands that OS X's speed is a problem. Steve Jobs stood up at WWDC and stated that speed was the number one complaint and concern about OS X. I think it is fair to say that if Jobs is making a statement like that in public, to Apple's developers, that there's been a fire lit ..."

"Expect that the applications running on OS X will be slower than the same applications running on OS 9 (with some rare exceptions -- OpenGL performance seems better under OS X, for instance). There are two main reasons for this: the first is that OS X is slower than OS 9, because it is a preemptive multitasking OS that was written to work first, it hasn't yet been optimized, and because it uses a lot more memory than OS 9. The second reason is that the applications running on OS X have been written to work first (Mac OS developers are just getting up to speed writing apps for the new OS), and haven't been optimized for OS X yet."

"So what can you do to speed up OS X? First, get more RAM. OS X chews up RAM like there's no tomorrow; part of the reason for this is that every window on screen has a backing store, so creating a new window means allocating a good bit of memory...For instance, a window that is 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels high, in millions of colors, uses up 1.9MB of RAM. For a single window. And that doesn't even count the actual contents of the window."

Check out the entire article. It is very enlightening. We also encourage developers to share their experiences with creating Mac OS X applications: send us an email.