Performance sucks (iBook G3 900)

Try using Disk Utility to repair your startup disk (hard drive) as shown in Dr.Smokes Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption. Do the other things in there too.
Here's his maintenance link so you can start a monthly maintenance program, if you haven't done so already.

Cheers!
DALE

How much free space do you have on your hard drive? If you don't have 10-15% of your total drive space free, the OS can not handle virtual memory in an optimal way which could cause a huge performance hit. Also, open up Activity Monitor next time you are on your machine and see if there are some process running that shouldn't be. Especially ones that are taking large percentages of your CPU. HTH.


-NifflerX

Did you do the hard drive repair? That is different then repairing permissions. Follow the link for repairing your startup disk (hard drive).

Cheers!
DALE

Hi Tsoonamy,

try this: Mac OS X 10.3/10.4: System maintenance

My experience suggests that a G3 is just too slow for Pather. I haven't tried it on a machine as fast as yours. But I have tried it on a 450MHz B&W G3 and on a 500MHz iBook. I don't think disc performance is an issue, the B&W had SCSI and the iBook had a 7200rpm drive. On both of those Panther ran so slowly it was unusable.

There is a peice of sharware called, I think "shadowkiller" that stops the GUI from drawing shadows - speeds it up a bit, but not enough.

By comparison, a G4/733 and a Mini G4 1.42 are both plenty fast enough. A 1.25 eMac seems OK too. So my experiece suggests that it's the G3 that Panther doesn't like.

My advice would be, buy a new machine if you can afford one.
If not, try using 10.2.8 - that seems to run MUCH faster on a G3.

Good luck.

Hello Tsoonamy,

Well first off, without wanting to disrespect Luke (previous post), what he says is quite simply not true and I can say that with first hand experience. I'm sure others will back me up.

I run Panther on an old Powerbook G3 400Mhz, with 768Mb and about 8Gb free on the system volume and it runs like a dream. Safari, Firefox, etc don't have the slightest problem. The only app that's started running a bit slow is iTunes 6, but then the minimum requirement is 500Mhz afterall, so I shouldn't wonder at that. And for the record, by the way, Panther blows Jaguar to pieces as far as performence is concerned. Indeed installing Panther was the best thing I ever did, it gave my Powerbook a new lease of life.

I would say, plenty of RAM (at least 256Mb) and free disk space (min. 5Gb) on the System volume (if, like me you've got several disk volumes) are about the only prerequisites for happily running 10.3.9. on anything upwards of about 400Mhz. Aside from fault-free hardware of course!

But it sounds like you've got all that, so something is definately not right and my guess is something's gone wrong with the OSX installation. So my advice, before you go buying a new computer, (and if you're going to do that then you certainly have nothing to lose anyway in trying this out), is back up your Home directory and just install the whole lot again from scratch. Did you previously do a clean install of Panther or was it over the top of Jaguar? The latter, shouldn't be a problem, theoretically, but a clean install is, well, just cleaner! 😉

And don't, please, whatever you do, go and buy a Windows machine!!! that is not the cure for a slow running iBook! I only mean that half jokingly of course (I run 2 windows machines out of necessity), but joking aside, your problem is most certainly not down to general poor performance of your particular iBook model. If I haven't convinced you yet, my girlfriend has an iBook G3 600, 384Mb running Tiger, which is not only faster than my Powerbook, but an equal match for my PIII 900Mhz IBM Thinkpad / Win 2K.

Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn... just try reinstalling Panther 🙂

Good luck!

PS. and if you really don't want to believe your iBook is a decent machine, I'll take it off your hands for a couple of hundred Euro 😉

BeigeG3 400/256/40 OS921, PismoG3 400/768/80 Mac OS X (10.3.9) Atari 1040 STe, 4Mb, 100Mb HD, Zip 100, 4x CD

I run 10.3.9 on a B&W G3 900MHz (powerlogix card) and it runs super - very snappy. I agree with the previous poster - the hardware should be fine (if it is working OK).

Try downloading Xupport and go to "Maintenance" and run "All" - I have seen this help slow performance.

You may not be able to do this with a notebook, but Xupport makes it VERY easy to move your virtual memory file to another drive which helps performance.

I had a similar performance problem on another 10.3.9 box and the cause was Virex 7.6 VShieldCore hogging my cpu.

Just a few ideas.

Interested to read that some people have a positive experience of 10.3 on a G3.

I can only repeat my experience, as before, is that it *****.

Having said that I realised that we do use a CRT iMac (g3 either 500 or 600MHz), and THAT one does run OK.

But my iBook and B&W didn't.

So there is an issue that I haven't identified.

I'd be interested if anyone had any suggestions.

Thanks

Hi Tsoonamy:

I have to echo the last couple of posters. I'm quite happily running Panther on my 700MHz G3 iBook with 384MB RAM. I routinely have 10 apps running (Safari, Word, email, Terminal, database software, etc.), and the only time I've seen performance like you're experiencing is when the LCRecentTool process got out of hand, and was hogging 100% of processor power. This is the daemon that tracks your recent applications and documents. Disable the Recent Items list from the Appearances pane of your System Preferences, and if the process exists in your Activity Monitor, kill the process.

I'm not going to state categorically that there's nothing wrong with your hardware, but if everything is working properly, your iBook is absolutely capable of running Panther.

Hope you get this fixed; I use Windows as well, but I don't think that's a solution.

Andrew Penner

Luke,
Did you use a retail (universal and black in color) of Panther to install on all those Mac's or did you use a disk that shipped with another Mac (machine specific)?
What issues do you have or have you given up?

Cheers!
DALE

Hi Dale

In all cases the install disc was a retail, black boxed one.

The slow machines just suffered from general slowness - not related to any particular application. Everything took a long long time. Sorry I can't be any more specific than that.

If you did have any suggestions I'd be interested - I have the iBook and 4 B&Ws lying around at work - they are worth so little it's not worth the trouble trying to sell them, so if I can somehow make then useful with 10.3 that would be a good outcome. I have tried upping the RAM and using faster discs, but these don't help. I wonder why the iMac is happy when these machines aren't.

Cheers.

Have you tried a clean install? Completely wiping the drive and reinstalling?

If you want to sell it cheap, I would be interested. 😉

I run 10.3.9 on a 400 MHZ machine, 384 meg ram with no problems.

Mike