OS X Rot?

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2006-06-22 03:04am

We had a reseller from germany over here this week and he had an Apple laptop with him, the latest PPC model before the switch apparently and I told him I was planning on buying a 17" Macbook Pro later when the Merom chipset comes out and he told me not to buy a mac.

Hey what? Is this a mac user or some kind of cleverly disguised spy sent by the dark lords Balmer and Gates? Anyway he continued by saying that this was the fourth apple computer he owned and he was not going to buy another one. He has been more and more dissapointed with what he sees as steadily decreasing quality in apple products, he says his friends who got the x86 laptops where also mostly dissapointed in those.

And beyond quality problems with the hardware itself he has issues with OS X. He does think Apple has done a great job, it works, it looks fabulous and it's stable but damnit, run it one year and it'll be so fucking slow it's worse than "Windows Rot", takes 20 seconds to just open the home folder and after that you are afraid to do anything he says.

This is the first I've heard of any of this.

rhoenix · Post by **rhoenix** » 2006-06-22 03:48am

Well, I have a 15" Powerbook from around the same timeframe, right before Apple switched from PPC to Intel.

I have never observed "rot" in any aspect of use. Not once has my computer slowed down without explicable and fixable reason in all the time I've owned it.

Not all experiences are the same, I grant that. However, my laptop has been my only computer for the past year and change, I use it nearly all the time, and I regularly have uptimes of weeks or longer without noticing any degredation.

EDIT: removed redundant "however"

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2006-06-22 04:28am

First I've ever heard of it.

Does he run maintenence on the thing?

IIRC OS X automatically maintains itself at certain times of the night, but if you always shut off the computer for the night this maintenence never happens. You can also do permissions repairs on your own.

Ah, google is my friend.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html

Mac® OS X is a UNIX®-based system, built specifically on FreeBSD®. UNIX systems run scheduled maintenance routines — known as maintenance scripts — to clean up a variety of System logs and temporary files. By default, these are executed between 03:15 and 05:30 hours local time, depending on the script.

If your Mac is shut down or in sleep mode during these hours, the maintenance scripts will not run. [1] This results in log files that will grow over time, consuming free space on your Mac OS X startup disk.

If your Mac is shut down or left in sleep mode overnight, you need to invoke these maintenance routines manually on a regular basis. That is, unless you plan on devoting a large portion of your hard drive to the files cleaned-up by these routines!

Manually running the maintenance scripts
The easy way

We recommend you download and install one of the following utilities, depending on the version of Mac OS X you are using, and run them regularly to execute the Mac OS X maintenance scripts:

* The shareware utility Cocktail, which is available in specific versions for Tiger, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther®, and Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. Employ the version of Cocktail corresponding to the version of Mac OS X you are using.
* Cocktail offers a variety of other functions which are useful in troubleshooting, making its modest shareware price "money well spent."
* The freeware utility MacJanitor. Under Tiger, be sure to use version 1.3 or later.

You may find additional solutions by searching MacUpdate or VersionTracker™.

With these utilities you can run any individual maintenance script — daily, weekly, or monthly — or run them all. For example, running all three scripts weekly is a good habit if your Mac is frequently shutdown or in sleep mode overnight.

While we have not tested it, we have read positive reports from users of the freeware application Anacron, which runs the maintenance scripts automatically if the computer is awake and the scripts have not run when scheduled. Separate versions of Anacron are available for Tiger, Panther, and Jaguar.

I've heard this is especially a big deal on laptops because owners generally close the laptops at night.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-06-22 04:29am

Not only have I never seen rot, most Mac laptop users I know of never even turn OSX off. Rebooting is a strictly patch-time event, and response doesn't seem to drop detectably, even on the bottom-of-the-range 12" iBook. Compare to XP, which after only a few months will be taking literally twice as long to start, where every added application seems to slow down boot and the messy uninstall procedure.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-06-22 07:12am

The you need to repair permisions is a horrifying concept

Resinence · Post by **Resinence** » 2006-06-22 08:16am

Xon wrote:The you need to repair permisions is a horrifying concept

just like any other OS...

Never heard of OSX rot... or UNIX rot... or LINUX rot..

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2006-06-22 10:10am

Xon wrote:The you need to repair permisions is a horrifying concept

You don't really need to anymore. In older versions of OS X, it was necessary, so now it's become one of those instinctive troubleshooting steps. The percent of time it actually fixes anything is minuscule.

And I'll echo my comments at Ars. This sounds like a PEBKAC. There are just some users out there who suck at using computers, and any computer they use automatically goes to shit. I've never once observed this rot on my workstation at home or work, and I work both machines like dogs. They've both been running the same install of Tiger since it came out.

Windows Rot at least has a mechanism, that being the Registry ballooning to absurd sizes. I can't think of any mechanism in OS X that would cause the machine to slow down over time as a result of installing more and more apps unless the guy has literally installed every daemon he's ever come across. He should try creating a new user account and running in that one. I'd bet money that his problems with performance would disappear in another user account.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-06-22 11:12am

The biggest problem with the Windows registry is that it's incomprehensible. If logfiles or UNIX plaintext config files get bloated, you can just go into them and poke around. In the case of logfiles, you can simply delete or reset them. But when a Windows registry is fucked up, nobody knows what to do. There are plenty of cases where even very qualified people just say "fuck it, reinstall".

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-06-22 11:17am

Resinence wrote:
Xon wrote:The you need to repair permisions is a horrifying concept
just like any other OS...

Never heard of OSX rot... or UNIX rot... or LINUX rot..

My god you are moronic.

It is onething to get a considerable number of programs installed which all want to run at once(classical PEBKAC problem), it is quite another for the OS's core security architecture to go belly up on you!

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-06-22 11:25am

Darth Wong wrote:The biggest problem with the Windows registry is that it's incomprehensible.

Windows registry blot is the result of idiots installing junk, just deleting files from when the program uses an uninstaller or a broken uninstaller.

One of the major problems with the registry is programs & people half-assed reverse engineering stuff which has a perfectly workable public API. Not using the API causes all type of problems.

And most people cant write uninstallers for shit. There is a reason Microsoft made the .msi installer format.

If logfiles or UNIX plaintext config files get bloated, you can just go into them and poke around. In the case of logfiles, you can simply delete or reset them. But when a Windows registry is fucked up, nobody knows what to do. There are plenty of cases where even very qualified people just say "fuck it, reinstall".

Modern *nix desktops are adopting a registry, because it does have advantages. Uniform access format, journaling support, self-consistancy checks, awareness of the global cache, etc.

The biggest issue with the Windows Registry is there is no way to put comments or descriptions on stuff.

Pcm979 · Post by **Pcm979** » 2006-06-22 12:44pm

The worst slowdown I've ever had with OSX was trying to run Starship Titanic, but I didn't get it as a gaming platform anyway and it did everything else faithfully for five-ish years. My PC, on the other hand, is having a good day when it lasts five hours without crashing.

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2006-06-22 12:47pm

Pcm979 wrote:The worst slowdown I've ever had with OSX was trying to run Starship Titanic, but I didn't get it as a gaming platform anyway and it did everything else faithfully for five-ish years. My PC, on the other hand, is having a good day when it lasts five hours without crashing.

My PC hasn't slowed down since i've got it, i had windows rot on 98. but since getting this pc with xp 2 years ago.. i've had nothing.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-06-22 12:47pm

Destructionator XIII wrote:As I type this, I am realizing that adding such a field probably wouldn't hurt performance, as I imagine that internally, the registry is similar to a relational database and would be able to store these comment strings in a different table (or whatever analogous structure the registry has) and that would have a negligible affect run time performance. Nevertheless, good documentation seems to me like the more desired solution.

Separating the operating system's registries from user applications might help too. I'm still not seeing what the great benefit of a monolithic config database is.

Post by **Edi** » 2006-06-22 01:06pm

Darth Wong wrote:The biggest problem with the Windows registry is that it's incomprehensible. If logfiles or UNIX plaintext config files get bloated, you can just go into them and poke around. In the case of logfiles, you can simply delete or reset them. But when a Windows registry is fucked up, nobody knows what to do. There are plenty of cases where even very qualified people just say "fuck it, reinstall".

That'd be everyone at my workplace if a Windows problem doesn't go away with an hour's work. It's amazing, the kind of shit you see when the clueless ,asses use a computer for a few weeks to few years and accumulate all kinds of shit in it and then bring it to us for fixing. It isn't unusual to see machines infected with 800+ different viruses, worms, trojans and other shit or fucked up in various other ways.

Edi

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2006-06-22 01:09pm

I'll have had my iBook for a year next month and I've had zero problems with it. If there's some kind of OSX rot going on, it's extremely subtle.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2006-06-22 02:49pm

Stark wrote:Not only have I never seen rot, most Mac laptop users I know of never even turn OSX off. Rebooting is a strictly patch-time event, and response doesn't seem to drop detectably, even on the bottom-of-the-range 12" iBook. Compare to XP, which after only a few months will be taking literally twice as long to start, where every added application seems to slow down boot and the messy uninstall procedure.

Never turning it off is probably healthier for it, since it does all the maintenence in the background if you leave it on and you never have to do anything manually.

My Windows PC is just rotted to the core. Photoshop runs faster on my Dell laptop with a 700 MHz P3 than my Windows PC with a 2.6 GHz Pentium 4. Though the Windows PC works really good with games.

I'm thinking about buying myself an iMac to replace the gaming PC.

I have observed a buggy Mac before. I had crashing problems occasionally, though less often than my Windows laptop, and some apps were buggy. However, it was an early G3 that Apple didn't even support running OS X on, with some third party hack drivers to get the GPU to work under Panther. Which probably explains it.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-22 03:30pm

My WinXP box has been running for almost 2 years now with no reformat, and no rot to be found. I guess it's just the difference between good habits and bad habits.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2006-06-22 03:37pm

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:My WinXP box has been running for almost 2 years now with no reformat, and no rot to be found. I guess it's just the difference between good habits and bad habits.

And letting your sister install crap on it when you're not looking

thank goodness I finally put a password lock on it.

That's one of the annoying bits though. Installing too many programs slows down Windows. On OS X adding more programs is just adding more files in the Applications folder.

rhoenix · Post by **rhoenix** » 2006-06-22 05:08pm

Speaking from somewhat painful experience, Mac OSX isn't really recognized as a gaming platform anywhere even close to Windows is. I mean, for non-gaming, this laptop has handled everything I've ever needed to do, and there were proper programs to do so.

But yeah, I'm still masochistically waiting for Heroes 5 to be ported. On the other hand, Freespace 2 runs rather nicely on this computer.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2006-06-22 05:30pm

rhoenix wrote:Speaking from somewhat painful experience, Mac OSX isn't really recognized as a gaming platform anywhere even close to Windows is.

And that's relevant to this thread ... how?

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2006-06-22 06:21pm

rhoenix wrote:Speaking from somewhat painful experience, Mac OSX isn't really recognized as a gaming platform anywhere even close to Windows is. I mean, for non-gaming, this laptop has handled everything I've ever needed to do, and there were proper programs to do so.

But yeah, I'm still masochistically waiting for Heroes 5 to be ported. On the other hand, Freespace 2 runs rather nicely on this computer.

You can always install Windows via boot camp for games. *shrugs*

Spacebeard · Post by **Spacebeard** » 2006-06-22 06:39pm

Xon wrote:It is onething to get a considerable number of programs installed which all want to run at once(classical PEBKAC problem), it is quite another for the OS's core security architecture to go belly up on you!

Filesystem discretionary access control is not the "OS's core security architecture"(*), and furthermore it has not "gone belly up" when OS X users must repair file permissions. The reason why OS X users were have to "repair permissions" was that the permissions on certain important files were getting clobbered and set to incorrect values, causing certain operations to fail. The "repair permissions" operation reset them to the proper values. This problem could have occured on any platform with discretionary access control on files: UNIX, VMS, Windows, anything. The fact that OS X had to introduce a "repair permissions" feature is an indictment of whatever shoddy code was clobbering the permissions (probably installers), and of the fact that traditional Mac users aren't familiar with filesystem permissions and wouldn't think to check them when troubleshooting, not of any "core security architecture" failing.

(*) The feature that would best be described as a "core security architecture" in any operating system is the distinction between kernel mode and user mode. That's a fundamental feature of all operating systems.

rhoenix · Post by **rhoenix** » 2006-06-22 07:23pm

Durandal wrote:
rhoenix wrote:Speaking from somewhat painful experience, Mac OSX isn't really recognized as a gaming platform anywhere even close to Windows is.
And that's relevant to this thread ... how?

Praxis wrote:I'm thinking about buying myself an iMac to replace the gaming PC.

It was in reference to the above earlier quote from Praxis - apologies for being unclear.

Praxis wrote:You can always install Windows via boot camp for games. *shrugs*

I'm not quite that masochistic.

To be honest, I'm trying to keep myself from getting sucked into new games, since I know I tend to obsess about them until completed, and I'm attempting to focus on writing as a goal.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-06-22 07:33pm

Darth Wong wrote:
Destructionator XIII wrote:As I type this, I am realizing that adding such a field probably wouldn't hurt performance, as I imagine that internally, the registry is similar to a relational database and would be able to store these comment strings in a different table (or whatever analogous structure the registry has) and that would have a negligible affect run time performance. Nevertheless, good documentation seems to me like the more desired solution.
Separating the operating system's registries from user applications might help too. I'm still not seeing what the great benefit of a monolithic config database is.

The Windows registry is seperated into about half a dozen different physical files. The user and machine parts are seperate, however shitty apps from Win9x days dont bother with the seperation and the common run as admin part just blows it away

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2006-06-22 08:18pm

It should be noted that the reason there are so many poorly-behaving apps on Windows is because Microsoft itself was lax with security for so long. Now that they're actually getting serious about it, they have to drag their third-party developers kicking and screaming into a new way of writing applications.