Leopard on a G4 is surprisingly snappy

[protocol7]

So I decided to try and install Leopard onto my Gigabit Ethernet. I ran LeopardAssist from Tiger and rebooted to a kernel panic. Some googling alerted me to the fact that my firmware was a bit on the old side so after applying the update from Apple I happily installed and updated to 10.5.8.

I was expecting it to be a bit of a pig. And it kinda was at the start. Top showed that mdworker was killing the CPUs so I disabled indexing ("sudo mdutil -avi off") and the idle load went from 60-70% to about 4%. I'd already swapped out the Rage 128 for the Radeon 9000 from my dead MDD so while I still lack CoreImage it's still quite usable (adding a CI-compatible card means losing acceleration in OS9).

I ran XBench on both Tiger and Leo and it was pretty close. Leo won out in some tests, Tiger in others.

 

[tmtomh]

I concur. Part of it is that Tiger is already a pretty big RAM hog - so most G4s that can run Tiger well will likely run Leopard just fine too.

 

[beachycove]

What will killing indexing disable along with it?

 

[protocol7]

Spotlight (and I guess anything that relies on it).

 

[tmtomh]

I know many folks like to disable Spotlight indexing in these situations... but I never quite understood that.

Spotlight indexing totally kills performance right after a new installation, because Leopard has to index the entire contents of the hard drive. But the solution to that is simply not to use the computer (or not to expect decent performance) for one to three hours after installation.

But once the initial indexing is done (when the little blinking dot disappears from the Spotlight magnifying glass in the menubar), there's no more performance hit.

Spotlight will of course occasionally have to update its index; but those updates are brief and relatively infrequent - it's just the initial indexing that's disruptive.

That said, I do wish Apple would make Spotlight a little "smarter" in this respect - doing a fresh install of Leopard retail of course requires tons of updates to be downloaded and installed immediately via Software Update. It would be nice if Spotlight indexing could be delayed until after all that was done.

 

[techknight]

i dont know. my ibook G4 1.25ghz model runs leopard kinda slow. my G3 900 runnin tiger with less ram felt peppier.

 

[applefreak]

snappy <> slow

desktop <> powerbook

amount of GHz CPU and busspeed, amount of ram

spotlight

not to use the computer for one to three hours after installation

depends on size of HD and size in use

But the solution....

you can drag the HD

system preferences > spotlight > tab privacy

on the zone above the + -

> stop indexing

and when you have the time (perhaps during the night)

select the HD and click on -

or drag the HD out the zone

> indexing of the HD starts

but for all ppc G4, G5 i prefer 10.4.11

______________________________________________________________________________

my apple collection

.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Losing Classic is too big a price for me to personally pay, though. So Tiger forever on my PowerPCs.

 

[bittin]

i bought a 12" DVI Powerbook G4 from a friend and it has 10.5.8 on it, and iam amazed on how well it runs

 

[protocol7]

It is a shame they dropped Classic in Leopard but I found that I really didn't use it all that much. I was more likely to just reboot into OS 9.

 

[Hrududu]

Leopard does do pretty well on G4's. Some are much better than others, and in some cases not well enough for everyday use. For example, I have 2 TiBooks and both are still running Tiger even though one is 867MHz and the other is 667MHz. They still see enough everyday use that I want them running as smooth as possible. The 17" 1GHz iMac is running Leopard since its got 2GB of RAM, but its still not what I would call fast. My 1.5GHz Powerbook smokes through Leopard and I would never see any reason to downgrade. I would assume that just about anything over 1GHz does a much better job at Leopard if given enough RAM and a fast HD. The last G4 in the house running Leopard is my G4 Cube. At 500MHz, 1.5GB and a Radeon 7500, its about the absolute minimum to get it going. Its slow, but I just enjoy seeing such a great old computer running Leopard. I use this thing all the time, but I have to be patient with it. I think your dual processors are what make the difference. With Tiger, my cube scored 22.34 and Leopard brought it down to an 18.43.

 

[racepres]

As ClassicHasClass said

Losing Classic is too big a price for me to personally pay, though. So Tiger forever on my PowerPCs

When I can't use that anymore.... Sell the Farm and use Linux to browse, and ride off into the sunset!!

RP

 

[MacJunky]

That is why you have to get a smokin fast box dedicated to running OS 9 natively!

 

[ClassicHasClass]

That's fine for games, but it sucks for productivity apps. For example, I use an old 68K version of OmniPage for basic OCR. Why? Because on a quad G5, it runs unholy fast.

I also make frequent use of TiMIDIty, which is so much better in its OS 9 incarnation. Now I can have things playing in Classic while I, say, browse 68KMLA with TenFourFox. Similarly, GIF Builder is very nice for making simple animations from stills and I've gotten my workflow in it to be very fast.

Sure there are OS X native versions of these, or OS X tools that do similar things, but none that run as fast, and some require me to go out and buy them. So while it makes good sense to fire up my OS 9 games machine to play Shogo MAD (no native OS X version), or System Shock Mac, it really stinks for apps that you actually use. Classic bridges that gap better than anything.

SheepShaver, before someone brings it up, is a wonderful hack but nothing more. It's too unstable for practical use. It crashes intermittently on both my G5 and my Intel mini. Classic crashes only about as much as OS 9 does, which is sometimes, but not often with a tuned set of extensions and applications.

 

[mcdermd]

Safari 4/5 is what kills a G4. Turning off the Top Sites and History previews helps a lot as does removing Adobe Flash support.

 

[rimmer]

FWIW, I'm running 10.5.8 on my G4 Cube, with a 1.7 Ghz upgrade from OWC, 1.5 gig ram and a Radeon 7500. It's as snappy as my C2D MAcbook Pro late 2008 on everyday tasks, but cannot be trusted for HD vid and such, but to ageing 100Mhz bus.

But I still love my "PowerCube" to bits!

Cheers