Mac OS X is S L O W
I hadn’t realized just how much of a resource hog Quartz/Aqua was.
First, get an app called Let1kWindowsBloom. This will time how long it takes to open and close 1000 windows. Do a few manipulations, like use different color depths and hiding/showing the dock.
For instance, in millions of colors, with the doc shown, and a bunch of apps running, it took 103 seconds. In thousands of colors, the dock hidden, no applications running, I was able to get that down to 58 seconds. I then tried a few extra things like using Shadow Killer that removes the all of the drop shadows and using the SilverFox theme available here which removes transparency from menus. This brought it down to 49 seconds with no applications running.
The two biggest variables seem to be whether you have any applications running and your display color depth. The effect of having applications running belies the notion that it doesn’t matter have many applications you have running in OS X.
I have a PowerBook G4/550 with 512mb of RAM. This is too fast of a machine to have these sorts of problems. For perspective, this test only took 9 seconds in OS 9.2. Crazy. OS X 10.2 had better fix this.
