reesesWeb

No, this is not about the defunct Macintosh clone and peripherals company. This is about the absurdity that is my new PowerBook, the purchase of which I have mentioned before.

This is not to brag, but to provide some context. I bought the 15", 1.67Ghz SuperDriveDL G4 PowerBook. I bought it with a 7200rpm internal drive and 2GB RAM. It comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 framebuffer with 128 megs of RAM on an AGP bus. Other than lagging way behind the G5 in power, it's reasonably respectable.

When I first opened the box, I set up the Mac, and then used Migration Assistant, or whatever it's called, to copy over my users, applications, and settings. Everything looked groovy.

Then I ran all the OS updates, bringing me to 10.4.3 and a sorely-needed Airport Express patch. Great news so far.

Then, of course, mdimport ran rampant for the first day. I fully expected this, as it takes time to index 70 gigs or so on the internal drive, and a hundred or so on the non-"Private" (i.e., non-backup, since I didn't need three copies of this junk in the index) external Firewire drives. I let it alone most of the day Saturday, and focused on other tasks. Like watching D.E.B.S..

What has been bothering me is that, since then, the box is still BLOODY SLOW. WindowServer was taking up 30% CPU, and when it wasn't, mdimport was waking up and grabbing 35%. Sometimes both would happen at once. This wasn't while idle, either. Since it's a system process, and since it's spawned (and ergo I can't just renice mds) as "needed", I had no defense against it.

Googling like mad for "WindowServer cpu usage suck ass pain" and browsing around, I found this bit of advice about keeping as few items as possible on the Desktop. Now, I'm not a total icon freak. I have 1920x1200 + 1440x960 pixels to spread icons around, and I only had about 40 icons on the screen. They were small, but I still removed as many as possible, even moving some items to external drives. mdimport of course had to take notice of this, and I suffered, but when I was finished, I noticed that WindowServer's usage was down a little bit.

Hmm.

A hundred years ago, when we ran X terminals (yes, I know they're dead), or just an X server on limited graphics hardware, a picture on the root window was murder on memory usage. However, I don't have a memory usage problem, I have a CPU problem.

Regardless, I did the math, and thought, ok, if the Mac is double-buffering, using 8 bits of alpha, and in general being an idiot about display usage, 128M isn't enough. In fact, my simple calculations using google show me that ((1 920 * 1 200) + (1 440 x 960)) * 32 = 117 964 800. That's just a wee bit under 128M. I don't do transparency, although I do have window shadows on. I'm not an egregious abuser of system resources, I'm being a pretty typical user. I don't even have the 30" LCD, which this bloody laptop "supports".

Still, the video card is AGP, right? And I have loads of free memory, so a memcpy across AGP can't be that expensive, can it?

I removed the background pictures. Lo, WindowServer is taking 2% CPU at idle, and occasionally spikes all the way up to 7%.

I can't believe how amateurish and 1993 this is. I'm actually running as many apps as possible from another system, and exporting them as X clients, annoying as that is, as I have to remember to use ctrl instead of swirly-butterfly when using X apps, and of course the cut-and-paste and alt-tab behavior is all brokenated.

Now I still have mdimport waking up every minute or so and spiking to 35%, but at least WindowServer is leaving me overhead so I can get some work done. I've added as many folders to the "Private" list as possible, and slowed down email polling to every 15 minutes from every five, but it doesn't seem to be helping. I even bought a utility called Sonar that helped trim things down a little bit, but hasn't really penetrated to the core of the matter.

What's the core of the matter? That Spotlight seems like the bee's knees for three or four days, and then I have to shut the bastard off. I had to do that with the old laptop as well. This is a real pain, because Mail.app depends on it for full-message searching, but the purpose of my computer is not to "find things on my computer", but to let me get work done.

On the bright side, I picked dark grey as my "Solid Color" background (since I can't apparently pick an arbitrary color), and it doesn't reveal the stupid low-quality wave pattern as obviously as the blue-toned picture I was using before.

I can't believe I keep throwing money at these idiots. Do they use these laptops, or does every developer at Apple use dual/quad-G5s because they're so much faster?

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