newton@cs.utexas.edu (Peter Newton) (06/20/91)
With the talk of System 7.0 slowness, I thought I would time some
things and get some relatively hard data. The bottom line is that
I consider System 7.0 usable on a plus, but there are problem areas
such as printing.
First, my system. Mac Plus with 2.5 MB RAM. I have two identical old
Rodime 20 hard disks. I put System 6.0.5 (with multifinder) on one,
and System 7.0 on the other. Both systems were installed by first
deleting any old systems and then installing (Mac Plus only software)
from Apple distribution disks. There is no chance of mixing System 7
and System 6 things. I run with only one of the hard disks at a time.
Other than system things, both disks contain almost exactly the same
files. Both disks have about 3-4 Meg of free space. The System 7.0
disk is probably less fragmented. My system 6.0.5 is augmented with a
large number of inits. I run only Disinfectant init with 7.0.
Here are results. Numbers are times unless otherwise noted (so
smaller is better). First, in a bunch of tests, Sys 7.0 and 6.0.5
were about equal. In the scrolling test, the necessary bitmap fonts
were installed in both cases. The document contains a few PICT
figures.
6.0.5 7.0
Scroll 7 pages, MS Word 4.0 - 7 8
Launch MS Word 4.0 ---------- 9 10
Ephem (Floating point comp) - 58 58
Copy 318K file -------------- 12 14
Close finder windows -------- 5 6
DiskTimer II ---------------- (140 134 35) (130 98 35)
Subjectively, I find that System 7.0 is very slow at opening a new
finder window when I double click on a folder. The timings bear this
out, but it "feels" even slower than the numbers indicate. I am not
sure why. I mostly used view by icon. I did not open system folders
or the system file.
6.0.5 7.0
Open some finder windows --------- 9 13
Serial port speeds are important to me. My plus is directly wired (no
modem) to a Sun 3. I run terminal emulators at 19200 KB. I tried
some downloads (cps is characters per second).
6.0.5 7.0
MacLayers download ------------- 805 cps 518 cps
ZTerm 0.85 download ------------ 15 sec failed
I do not know why there is such a large difference here. It's a
problem area. Also, ZTerm did not exactly fail. It detects errors
and has to resend, which greatly slows it down. Could ZTerm have been
suffering from buffer overflow under 7.0? I have never been sure
whether my flow control works.
And the real System 7.0 disaster... Printing when truetype fonts are
involved. What I report is the time to create a postscript file.
6.0.5 7.0
MS Word 4.0 Postscript create --- 15 120
The document is pure text, a couple of pages long, and the only font
used is Monaco 9. I have font substitution enabled in both cases. I
tried substituting New York 9 and Times 9 under 7.0. Times INCREASED
by as much as 60 seconds. Then I tried Palatino 10. I do not have a
truetype palatino. The System 7.0 time dropped to 20 seconds.
Let the net know, if you find a way to speed things up!
----
Peter Newton
Computer Sciences, TAY 2.124 (512) 471-9735
University of Texas at Austin newton@cs.utexas.edu
Austin, TX 78712-1188 ...{uunet|gatech|ames}!cs.utexas.edu!newton