I haven’t been a good blogger, but I’ll try by keeping this short, in penance.
OS X Tiger is fucked.
Am I the only person to note that OS X 10.4 “Tiger” experienced the following trend:
a) 10.4 released. Cool new stuff. Slow Spotlight… much slower than the demo Jobs showed at the Expo a while ago.
Then again, I have about 1TB of storage to search.
b) 10.4.1 released two weeks later. MASSIVE SLOWDOWNS to operating system in general, and Spotlight. Ex.:
b.1) Safari = started like Gnomes on crack, to quote a friend and colleague Jason Anderson. Now, will diddle around with a site for a while before returning “page not found” or whatever, much more frequently than usual.
b.2) Massive delays when opening or saving files, especially after a reboot or a rewake-from-screensaver operation. 15-25 seconds of Beach Ball of Death.
c) 10.4.2 released two or three weeks ago. (B) + more of the same.
Jesus. My mother is calling me daily, after I upgraded her machines to 10.4 to get the Safari bookmarks/Mail-via-DotMac-Syncronization thing to work, because her “internet is down” every ten hours. No, it’s not down – Safari is fucking things up. It’s thinking, then barfing.
Did something happen in 10.4 to the IP stack as well?
Explanation? My theory is that such much filesystem-level stuff got re-written with 10.4 (although I know the code has been lurking for a while), that 10.4 was found to have some significant data integrity issues, leading to massive checking with 10.4.1 and 10.4.2.
I suspect by 10.4.9 next August, we’ll be where we need to be, in time to wait a year for Wild Mountain Cat or whatever 10.5 is called. Yes, I know the name is announced. Yes, I’m too lazy to look it up. I’m an awful blogger.
It still beats not having Longhorn… or whatever MS is calling it as of a week or two ago.
Cheers,
rds
