5 ms·
Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field
by zackmorris 7mo ago
Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird.
My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating.
I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something.
I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult.
I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.
- AceJohnny2 7mo ago> Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade That's because some app is spamming window updates. It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.
- sunnyps 7mo agoBut apps shouldn't be able to hammer WindowServer in the first place. If your app is misbehaving, your app should hang, not the OS window compositor! FWIU there's really no backpressure mechanism for apps delegating compositing (via CoreAnimation / CALayers) to WindowServer which is the real problem IMO.
- steve1977 6mo agoAnd I could imagine SwiftUI only makes this worse, because it's quite easy to trigger tons of unnecessary redraws.
- saagarjha 6mo agoPeople don't really like apps that stutter.
- duskdozer 6mo agoAnd maybe that would get enough users to leave or complain that managers might allow some dev time to fix bad behavior.
- jbverschoor 6mo agoSymptoms with no way to understand why. If Apple would give insight about this, the developers wold get bug reports and complaints Similar to the electron shit
- mentalgear 7mo agoQubesOS seems a great migration target: it runs Apps/OS in secure sandboxes - and even with that overhead doesn't seem worse than the terrible MacOS 26 performance.
- saagarjha 6mo agoI think suggesting QubesOS to someone is coming from macOS is a really bad choice.
- aetimmes 7mo agoI think we're already seeing the operating systems that AI can build, and I don't think they've been an improvement.
- girvo 7mo agoThe fact microsoft keeps messing up my Windows 11 gaming desktop, I think you're right.
- classified 6mo agoGaming is one more area where Linux has surpassed Windows. I'm using Valve's Proton to run Windows games on Linux and it's smooth as butter.
- root_axis 6mo ago> Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on. I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting 3 minutes for the OS to boot, or waiting 30 minutes to install a 600mb video game from local media. My m2 air with 16gb of memory only has to reboot for updates, I haphazardly open 100 browser tabs, run spotify, slack, an IDE, build whatever project I'm working on, and the machine occasionally gets warm. Everything works fine, I never have performance issues. My linux machines, gaming pc, and phone feel just as snappy. It feels to me that we are living in a golden age of computer performance.
- mlyle 6mo agoMy M4 Max 128GB ... 90% of the time is like you say. 10% of the time, Windowserver takes off and spends 150% CPU. Or I develop keystroke lag. Or I can't get a terminal open because Time Machine has the backup volume in the half mounted state. It's thousands of times faster than the Ultra 1 that was once on my desk. And I can certainly do workloads that fundamentally take thousands of times more cycles. But I usually spend a greater proportion of this machine's speed on the UI and responsiveness doesn't always win over 30 years ago.
- jbverschoor 6mo agoOr contactsd lol Spotlight doesn’t make sense either.. caches get evicted, but there’s no logic that prevents it from building it back up immediately Log processes are fine, but they should never be able to use 100% / At the same priority (cpu+io)
- yourapostasy 6mo ago> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on. The modern throughput is faster by far. However, what some people mean when they talk about "slower" is the latency snappiness that characterizes early microcomputer systems. That has definitely gotten way worse in an empirically measurable fashion. Dan Luu's article explains this very well [1]. It is difficult today to go through that lived experience of that low latency today because you don't appreciate it until you lived it for years. Few people have access to an Apple ][ rig with a composite monitor for years on end any longer. The hackers that experienced that low latency never forgot it, because the responsiveness feels like a fluid extension of your thoughts in a way higher latency systems cannot match. [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/* https://danluu.com/input-lag/*
- nixpulvis 6mo agoNobody's been at the wheel for a while, it's just not a race car, it's a barge.
- kalleboo 6mo agokernel_task using 100% is the system thermally throttling and the OS spamming NOPs to cool the CPU down
- jbverschoor 6mo agoAny way to see that?
- fainpul 6mo agoI don't know much about CPU internals, but this sounds like bullshit to me. A NOP is still an instruction that uses a cycle - why should that cool the CPU down? The CPU frequency should get reduced to lower the power consumption and hence the temperature.
- saagarjha 6mo agoNot all cycles cost the same amount of power. (Not that you would want to spam nops for thermal management, you should idle the core with a pause etc that actually tells the processor what you are trying to do.)
- p_l 6mo agoIt used to be the case with intel macs and their atrocious confluence of cooling system, thermals, and power supply system (the CPU actually was not really to blame). But when RAPL and similar tools to throttle CPU are used, the CPU time gets reported as kernel_task - on linux it would show similarly as one of the kernel threads.
- saagarjha 6mo agoThis is usually not the case.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dealfinder994 6mo ago[dead]
- DeathArrow 6mo ago>I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Even if that would be possible, you can't run commercial software. And for many people, the software they run is more important than the OS.
- msla 6mo agoIs this a case of "It Just Works" or "You're Holding It Wrong"?
- epcoa 6mo ago> I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.
- bengale 6mo agoYeah this is my actual issue with Tahoe. It blows my mind people keep bringing up the corners when WindowServer is complete trash now.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6mo agoI'm very worried one day Apple will start enforcing upgrades to Tahoe just like Microsoft is doing with Windows.
- bubblesorting 6mo agoKernel_task is often the os thermal throttling, when was the last time you hit the vents with a can of compressed air?