apple, please fix OS X responsiveness!

First, you're not addressing Apple here; you're addressing other users.

Second, you're extrapolating your own problem to everyone else. I have no problem with latency in the UI. If you have unusually high latency only in Microsoft Office, then your concerns should be addressed to Microsoft. If you have it in all applications, then you should troubleshoot your setup. Most usablility issues are caused by third-party system modifications that the user chooses to install.

Every version of Mac OS X has had people who believe its responsiveness is horrid. Turns out just about everyone

who says it has been making errors in judgement of what to install over which system, and not mixing and matching

software and hardware in the correct proportions. My http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html page* covers speed across every

version of Mac OS X. If you are still having trouble, please identify which version of Mac OS X, what you have installed, which Mac model, how much RAM you have installed, how much free space you have, and the status of your backup. Without a properly backed up system, optimizing Mac OS X for your needs is impossible.

Please read this whole message before doing anything.

This procedure is a diagnostic test. It won’t solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.

Third-party system modifications are a common cause of usability problems. By a “system modification,” I mean software that affects the operation of other software -- potentially for the worse. The following procedure will help identify which such modifications you've installed. Don’t be alarmed by the complexity of these instructions -- they’re easy to carry out and won’t change anything on your Mac.

These steps are to be taken while booted in “normal” mode, not in safe mode. If you’re now running in safe mode, reboot as usual before continuing.

Below are four lines of text in monospaced type, which are UNIX shell commands. They’re harmless, but they must be entered exactly as given in order to work. If you have doubts about the safety of running these commands, search this site for other discussions in which they’ve been used without any report of ill effects.

Some of the commands will line-wrap in your browser, but each one is really just a single long line, all of which must be selected. You can accomplish this easily by triple-clicking anywhere in the line. The whole line will highlight, and you can then either copy or drag it. The headings “Step 1” and so on are not part of the commands.

Note: If you have more than one user account, Step 2 must be taken as an administrator. Ordinarily that would be the user created automatically when you booted the system for the first time. The other steps should be taken as the user who has the problem, if different. Most personal Macs have only one user, and in that case this paragraph doesn’t apply.

To begin, launch the Terminal application; e.g., by entering the first few letters of its name in a Spotlight search. A text window will open with a line already in it, ending either in a dollar sign (“$”) or a percent sign (“%”). If you get the percent sign, enter “sh” and press return. You should then get a new line ending in a dollar sign.

Step 1

Copy or drag -- do not type -- the line below into the Terminal window, then press return:

kextstat -kl | awk ' !/apple/ { print $6 $7 } '

Post the lines of output (if any) that appear below what you just entered (the text, please, not a screenshot.)

Step 2

Repeat with this line:

sudo launchctl list | sed 1d | awk ' !/0x|apple|com\.vix|edu\.|org\./ { print $3 } '

This time, you'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. You don't need to post the warning.

Step 3

launchctl list | sed 1d | awk ' !/0x|apple|edu\.|org\./ { print $3 } '

Step 4

ls -1A {,/}Library/{Ad,Compon,Ex,Fram,In,La,Mail/Bu,P*P,Priv,Qu,Scripti,Servi,Sta}* 2> /dev/null

Important: If you synchronize with a MobileMe account, your me.com email address may appear in the output of the above command. If so, change it to something like “user@me.com” before posting.

Remember, steps 1-4 are all drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste, whichever you prefer -- no typing, except your password.

You can then quit Terminal.

msreimol wrote:

If you google for OS X latency problems you may get the impression that there are some individual users with an individual setup who encounter latency problems with a particular version of OS X under certain circumstances. I think the opposite is true. I think there is something wrong deep in OS X related to ui interrupt processing.

The internet is a big place. Google will always tell you what you want to hear. Uninstall your anti-virus and you'll be fine.

Well this is STRICTLY a user to user forum. Any issues you have with code should be addressed directly to http://developer.apple.com/ where you can get a free account to send in bug reports here:

http://bugreporter.apple.com/

You can also provide general feedback here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Unless you wish to troubleshoot an existing latency issue you are observing on your computer now, you are in the wrong place.

That interrupt handling is as much a fault of the anti-virus author writing. They don't appear to understand how Apple's code is developed, or don't bother to read the http://developer.apple.com/ website properly to write proper code. ClamX AV is much better than McAfee or Norton for the Mac. And firewall software for the Mac is redundant because it is already built-in to the system preferences under sharing and security. Being redundant causes issues for the Mac. Macs don't have fragmentation issues like PCs either, and are able to regularly defragment files under 20MB in space. If it gets real bad for larger files many solve that issue by creating temporary swap file partitions that can be erased at will. If you treat a Mac like a PC, it is more like to act like a PC than the Mac that is desired. You have to treat a Mac like a Mac. As such unless you have an existing Mac that needs responsiveness fixing, we really can't help you solve your problem. Going based on Google reports, and reports on this forum in long threads where people have just ranted on, you aren't going to get any scientific ways of judging true latency.

Latency issues can be traced to many issues from third party hardware not written to take advantage of new code where the firmware isn't up to date, bad RAM, lack of disk space, permissions getting damaged, cache files getting damaged, plist files getting damaged, all due to aging of a hard disk, or bad RAM triggering crashes that force one to reboot using hardware instead of software, as well as legacy code trying to run on newer operating systems. Drivers whose code is legacy need to be updated by certain third parties for certain hardware. Certain hardware needs more leniancy towards Energy Saver low power mode incorporated in its design and firmware. I think instead of trying ask Apple to improve matters, a better approach would be to find out why technically your issues are happening, and address that to the developer community as a whole. Blaming Apple, or asking Apple to fix the issue here is not fruitful. Isolating your own issues, and issues with hardware and software I find is much more fruitful.

Also some network latency seems to be more readily traced to something wrong with the DNS chosen, as OpenDNS works better for some. Those not encrypting their wireless networks with WPA2 are subject to more network latency because their wireless has been hacked and other people are joining on the network with their own heavy network traffic. Satellite based internet services have a built-in latency that comes from delivering a signal to the satellite, and in some cases because a USB modem is used too many items sharing the USB bus may slow it down too.

Spotlight indexing can slow matters down. Wait till the index is done before attempting searches with any Apple software starting with Mac OS X 10.4.

Lastly, backing up your data while doing other tasks, will slow down.

If you desire to determine if any of these causes might be what is affecting you, feel free to ask how to determine if it is one of these possible causes based on your experience. It is a troubleshooting forum.

Let's distinguish two things here:

1. small delays, like menus not snapping open.

This is not a latency issue, this is Apple's Human Interface Guideles. Apple builds-in certain slownesses to make the UI more friendly and comfortable for human viewers. If you're used to Windows (which doesn't care about such things, and processes GUIs at maximum computational speed) then a tenth-of-a-second delay on a menu snapping open might seem like an eternity. But that's not Apple's issue.

2. real delays, like typing slowdowns or seconds-long unresponsiveness.

In my experience these are ''always'' caused by:

• Out-of-date or misconfigured third party software
• Corrupt preference files (particularly the Finder preferences)
• Slow network connections
• User-error of one sort or another.

Only the third is potentially related to Apple (I do suspect there's something odd about the way webkit handles page loads, though it might be specific to flash-content related).

I've never seen ''any'' latency issue that couldn't be traced to one of these things.

And of course Flash requires a certain amount of compression/decompression of data which can be traced back to the hardware component, being the RAM. If your RAM is bad, Flash can get slower. Sometimes only by swapping known to spec RAM that is specific to that machine model with a lifetime warranty, will you finally get results. Apple's Hardware Test, Member, Rember, and other hardware tests can't detect all bad RAM. Unfortunately RAM tests even as they are done in the factory can't isolate all bad RAM. There isn't enough time in the age of the universe to completely test every possible conceivable RAM combination of circuits on any RAM board that is 16MB or more. And now we are dealing with GB RAM boards.