Don’t Give Me More Speed, Give Me Efficiency

The raw processing power of modern Macs would fry even an original iMac, but all that speed doesn’t necessarily mean you get the job done faster. If there are inefficiencies in the system, you can end up wasting a lot of time staring at beach balls.

The worst offenders are web browsers. Browsers are the bane of our lives. You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t live without them.

In an online world, email clients and browsers are always on. My email client, though, doesn’t butcher my system like browsers do.

With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, “Hello browser my old fiend, you’ve come to torment me again, with the sounds of silence.”
That silence is the sound of me waiting for the browser to give me back my system.

Please, can someone develop a browser that is not a resource hog? Even when you’ve got dozens of pages open?

I don’t care anymore if it loads pages two seconds slower, because these fast browsers are sucking time right out of my life. With my browser open and several pages loaded, waking my Mac from sleep can take several minutes. Switching applications when my browser is feeling roguish can take even longer.

So what do I care if a page takes even 10 seconds longer to load if I know the browser isn’t going to give my system the proverbial kick to the groin? Why put effort into developing browsers to load pages faster when we’re connecting at higher and higher speeds? Put the effort into making browsers more efficient.

I run Safari 3 and, yes, it loads pages faster, but it still torments me with beach balls. I’ve tried Firefox and experienced exactly the same grief—along with more crashes. Safari 2 was also just as problematic. Opera had those and other issues that discouraged me from using it. Others, such as Camino and Shiira, are built on the same engines as Firefox and Safari, so I’m totally pessimistic about them being any better.

And to think the world is moving to browser based applications. Scary!

Another bane of my Mac life is Spotlight. I just think about other disks and it starts re-indexing. And if an application accesses a large number of files at one time, the mds process (which is all to do with metadata and indexing) goes berserk.

And as for the Intel CPU, my experience with it has been less than enjoyable. The kids’ G4 eMac and the school’s iMac G4s and PowerMac G5s (single processor, 1GB RAM) run more efficiently than my iMac Core 2 Duo. Yes they are slower, but I do a lot less thumb twiddling on them. Consider that at school, as I’m studying graphic design, I usually have Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Safari all running at the same time. Whereas I avoid that situation as much as possible on my iMac at home. A caveat: at school we run Adobe CS1, at home I’m running CS3. However, this shouldn’t make a difference considering the ages of the machines and applications are matched.

More memory should make a difference, but it shouldn’t have to; it’s not like my iMac is years old trying to run leading edge applications.

So, you can rave about your quadruple-eight-core-multi-dimensional-ten-gigahertz CPUs that’ll compute the billionth digit of pi before you’ve even thought to ask the question, but if the rest of the system is nutting it, the CPU is wasted. Give me back my PPC CPU.

On Intel Macs, somewhere between operating system, applications, memory, hard disk, and CPU, there’s a major bottleneck. Tiger was the first iteration of OS X for Intel processors and possibly the problems lie within.

Let’s hope a significant efficiency improvement is one of Leopard’s major secrets, because at the moment, the Intel is the most inefficient Mac I’ve used.