TenFourFox Performance

[winterlight]

Hi guys,

I have a Power Mac G5 (11,2) which should be a screamer with just about everything.  It has 16GB of PC2 4200 RAM and an SSD

I'm using TenFourFox and to be honest it's slow.

It's much slower than Chrome on Windows 10 with a 3.2GHz i7.  MUCH slower.

For example, having two windows with about 5 tabs open makes tab switching really slow.  Activity monitor shows that TFF is using  a very small amount of memory (~600MB) and CPU.
Scrolling through web pages is very painful.  It takes a lot of mouse wheel to get down the page.

I think I'm using the right version.  TFF shows me the USER AGENT field in the Troubleshooting info the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0 TenFourFox/G5

The question I have is whether I should be expecting the snappy performance I get with Chrome on Windows.

A couple of other things about my G5 performance, Stuffit 2010 (which is the last version that is compatible with 10.4) is very slow unstuffing files.  It takes about 10 min to unstuff a 60MB file. 

I've started to wonder if this machine is a counterfeit of some kind...

 

[IPalindromeI]

> It's much slower than Chrome on Windows 10 with a 3.2GHz i7.  MUCH slower.

>The question I have is whether I should be expecting the snappy performance I get with Chrome on Windows

I mean, what did you expect? Modern browser on a MUCH MUCH faster CPU stomps an older browser on a older, jankier (the G5 was not great, even at the time) CPU that its poorly optimized for. (ckaiser does stuff, but he can't beat the mass amount of resources poured into optimizations for x86)

> A couple of other things about my G5 performance, Stuffit 2010 (which is the last version that is compatible with 10.4) is very slow unstuffing files.  It takes about 10 min to unstuff a 60MB file. 

That I'm willing more to blame on Stuffit. It's crap software.

> I've started to wonder if this machine is a counterfeit of some kind...

Nah, you've just discovered that the G5 wasn't good at much other than looks. Consider looking into an SSD if you must wring performance out of this, as a lot of tasks are I/O bound.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

You'd probably get better performance on Leopard, TBH. 

 

[IPalindromeI]

Yeah, Leopard introduced some G5 optimizations, and you don't have the excuse of Classic to stay on Tiger.

 

[Cory5412]

To add: the reputation is that Stuffit was never particularly fast. Whether that's Stuffit's problem, the hardware's problem, or something else entirely, I couldn't say, but I will say that for my own part, my experience tracks with that reputation.

The Power Macintosh G5s in general were hypothetically good for a very very specific set of tasks when they were new, but only sort of because most commercial professional software never really optimized for it, so any advantage a G5 has over, say, a G4, is from pure brute force.

The first generation of Intel iMacs and MacBook Pros pretty much outran all but systems like the 2.7 and the Quad, and the Mac Pro took care of those very handily.

Another thing to note is that in the approximately twelve years since the G5 was a contemporary product, the web has become insanely heavy. You're not going to have a very good web experience with an x86 PC from 2004/2005 either. It might be slightly better because IE11 and Chrome are better browsers than Firefox, but you're still running up against the limitations of twelve-or-more-year-old hardware.

 

[bhtooefr]

And now, we're to the point where midrange smartphones can curbstomp even a G5 quad in performance. Atoms can curbstomp a G5 quad in performance.

 

[Gorgonops]

It's much slower than Chrome on Windows 10 with a 3.2GHz i7.  MUCH slower.

The Geekbench 2 score for a 2.5ghz Quad Core Power Mac G5 is around 3,500. You don't specify which i7 you're comparing it to; The *first* 3.2ghz i7, the i7-960 from late 2009, scores around 9,000, while the Haswell i7-4790S can top 17,000.

In other words, at a bare minimum, a quad-core i7 machine's CPU is at least three times faster than a Quad G5 (easily up to six times faster), and that's before you get to any other improvements in overall system performance (*) and differences in software. (Chrome is considered one of the fastest mainstream browsers out there while Firefox is usually one of the slowest, and that's in the mainline supported versions.) So, yes, I'd say it's 100% expected behavior that your Quad G5 is an utter slug compared to this other machine.

(* In particular look at the huge differences in Memory and Stream performance between the Intel CPUs and the G5. RAM performance was *always* PowerPC's Achilles heel. The G5 was an improvement over the G4, but at best it made it about even to the earlier versions of the Pentium 4. There's been a *lot* of water under the bridge since then.)

 

[Gorgonops]

A couple of other things about my G5 performance, Stuffit 2010 (which is the last version that is compatible with 10.4) is very slow unstuffing files.  It takes about 10 min to unstuff a 60MB file.

This *does* have me wondering, though: What kind of SSD do you have? Not all SSDs are created equal and some low-priced ones, particularly those made several years ago, have absolutely miserable write performance. (I have one of these early, craptastic MLC drives in a netbook and it's easily inferior to a decent spinning platter drive when it comes to write performance.) Combine this with the fact that any OS that runs on a G5 doesn't support TRIM and other SSD optimizations and you may well be having some disk performance issues.

 

[winterlight]

Thank you guys for the replies.  I think that gives me good context to place the performance of my G5.

One correction on my part.  The Stuffit file was 600MB at 10 min, not 60MB.  Sorry for the mistake.  It seems like ppl are expecting this level of performance from Stuffit though.  

I guess I'll just grin and bear it  :|

Thank you guys again.