Does Snow Leopard Actually Downgrade Performance?

Snow Leopard is being widely touted as a performance increase, but the OS upgrade resulted in a 10-15% performance DECREASE on both my Mac Pro as well as my MacBook Pro — at least, according to the Xbench benchmarking tool.

Now of course, that could just be things that Xbench measures, perhaps it doesn’t account or provide sufficient weight for multi-threading, and multi-tasking. But we would like to get to the bottom of this, and are asking for your help.

If you followed our handy dandy upgrade guide you ought so still have a functioning Leopard install to boot from. If so, please follow this testing protocol:

Power down your machine until cool.
Boot Leopard, and kill all running applications
Run XBench All tests except the drive test**
Upload results using the name: CoM – YOUR NAME – PRE (Uploading XBench results is part of the process. Once you’re done, it asks if you want to upload your results and what name to give it)

Use the same protocol with your Snow Leopard install, but name the result CoM – YOURNAME – POST.

Thanks in advance I’ll be releasing results in the next few days.

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** Why no drive test? XBench places too much emphasis on hard drive performance, and in an era where all hard drives perform basically the same, it skews all performance tests to the center. Running the test without drives provides a better picture of the actual performance delta.

20 comments »

About the author

Leigh McMullen leads the Advisory Services & Strategy practices for the professional services arm of one of the Big-Five firms. He has written several books that would cure any insomnia you might have, and is an avid Mac junkie.

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Posted in News, OS X |

trifero
Indeed, i have just run the tests requested , and Snow Leopard seems to downgrade the perfrormance, measured by Xbench.
CaryMG
I’ll say *this* ….
That fact that it COMPLETELY WITHOUT WARNING doesn’t display .PICTs [?!?] is a real kick in the balls.
I spent the better part of a day converting my images to .JPEGs with Preview.
http://www.davidrusling.co.uk David Rusling
I’d take benchmarks with a pinch of salt – whilst they can indicate performance, they can equally well mislead. My day to day feeling is that things are a bit faster on my (2006) MacBook…
http://web.me.com/mac.nz Mark Webster
I uploaded mine too – I noticed in my own reviews that Xbench showed a slowdown, but it doesn’t measure file copies which are much faster. Even uploading iWeb sites feels faster (not measured), and apps open faster.
I wonder whether Xbench itself is 10.6 ready?
Hanson
Allow me to point out that Xbench is outdated and extremely unreliable (in terms of repeatability) as far as benchmarks go. Version 1.3 came out a little over 3 years ago. Also, its OpenGL test is very limited.
http://christopheraceto.com AppleAce
Post about the speed issue here as well -
http://christopheraceto.com/2009/08/28/os-x-snow-leopard-vs-leopard-on-a-macbook-pro-disappointment/
It seems that everyone is seeing a slight decrease in performance, however, when running in 64bit mode there seems to be an increase of about 10-15 points –
http://christopheraceto.com/2009/08/29/32-bit-and-64-bit-snow-leopard-speed-on-a-macbook-pro/
Bill
Tiger to Snow gave me a 15% improvement. Still playing with the new features…
Stephen
I would like to know if the upgrade from Tiger is worth, b/s Leopard was slower than Tiger, if Snow Leopard is only slightly faster than Leopard, we are back to the Tiger performance…
So, thanks to who are already tested the new OS compared to TIGER.
Bye,
Stephen
http://None-lame,Iknow Wyliam Holder
I am running on a Dual Quad with 16 GB of memory. Snow Leopard runs
OK to begin with. However, after about 2 hours, every operation begins
to slow down. I get the rainbow wheel even when changing tabs in
Firefox. Selecting the System preferences from the Icon can take over
2 minutes. Over time the machine keeps getting slower until I reboot.
This was a fresh install with configuration copied from another drive.
Snow Leopard is essentially unusable in this condition.
I have switched back to Leopard for a few weeks.
http://www.redeyemedia.com.au Leonie Molloy
Since I did the quick install of Snow Leopard my design software keeps crashing especially Dreamweaver CS4. I want to dump Snow Leopard and go back to Leopard – how can I do this? When i have time i will do the recommended clean install but I have some critical work to do for the next few weeks. I haven’t noticed any increase in performance on my MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB memory
H.A
there is so many problems with this stupid OS ,
after doing a fresh install and migrating my setting , everything seemed to work fine for a couple of days , i was happy
then all of a sudden , problems ..
1- it takes for ever to start up ..more than 2 min
2-once it starts i cant click on my user account to log in for another 5 min
3-mutli gesture not working
4-the system is very slow
5-the activity manager reports that kernel_task is using more than half the system
in short i was wondering if there is a thread about how to go back to leopard without loosing my setting ?

http://cultofmac.com Leander Kahney
@H.A I don’t know. Good question. I’ll ask my colleague Leigh Mcmullen, who’s much more knowledgeable.

http://www.cultofmac.com Leigh McMullen
I don’t know for sure as I’ve not tried it, but I think your best best would be to follow the upgrade procedure described in this article, but just swap Leopard and Snow Leopard.
ie: Create a backup of your Snow Leopard install using Carbon Copy Cloner as described on an external drive.
Do a fresh install of Leopard 10.5.x
Use the “Migrate settings from my old mac” (with your old one being the snow leopard install on the backup drive)
patch and go.
———-
Write us back and let us know how it worked!
William
My experience with SL has not been one of increased speed at all. My finder’s display of the desktop is noticeably slower. Nothing feels faster, and my system seems to be more unstable. I have had to reboot more frequently, and have had some serious system crashes.
I am willing to wait out a few updates, but overall had this been a more expensive upgrade than $29, I would be upset. I hope Apple tunes this thing to live up to it’s billing. This was not ready for primetime in my opinion. I think they just wanted to beat Windows 7 to the punch.
I was hoping to see the kind of speed increase like when we went from Jaguar to Panther (which I still say is the nimblest OSX yet, despite all the ravings about Tiger).
A.H
hey guys , the solution was very simple, flash P.Rom
now i am loving my mac back
Francis Shephard
AH you say this:
hey guys , the solution was very simple, flash P.Rom
now i am loving my mac back
-=============
is that in relation to going back to normal leopard – and then migrate settings from my old mac” – via a carbon copy clone?
I’ve just got a 17″ MBP and migrated my previous mac to it, and am getting the 100% kernel problem and massive delays at the boot up screen. SNOW LEOPARD is rubbish at this stage…………
Need to get back to Leopard which actually works without all this hassle. Any help on getting back greatly appreciated
Ee
A new OS needs a new instal.
Fresh, start from scratch instal of 10.6.2.
Then you’ll have an OS that shows increased performance caompared to a fresh instal of 10.5.8.
Macsincolorado
I have recently upgraded to Snow Leopard. So far I like the basic improvements.
There are a few little glitches I’ve notice. Mostly some lags in typing. Other than that, the booting is faster, loading of programs is faster, and general use is faster. I cannot speak for actual benchmarking but if you are like me and your usage is mostly internet, craigslist, email, weather, and multimedia……Snow leopard is noticeably faster. You don’t need a benchmark tool to tell you this. But!!! if you are a gamer, poweruser, or may be running windows in a virtual machine, you may want to seriously analyze any benefits if any at all snow leopard has to offer. I also installed snow leopard on my first generation mac mini. That machine is significantly faster now that with osx leopard.
Just my two cents
Toro
I’m with the crowd on this one; SL is a piece of crap. I have done a clean install after having problems with the upgrade to 10.5.8 and the machine still all of a sudden begins to run like a 1980s vintage IBM. It is amazing at first, but once this problem starts, it’s crushed. I’m going to give it one more chance after a few other website suggestions, and then it’s revert back to Leopard time.
Rolo
I when I first got my 13in black MacBook in Aug. 2008 I had no problems with anything I didn’t use it for anything special, just basic internet and writing papers. It worked great. Then towards Nov. 2009 my operating system (Leopard) crashed. The strangest way I had a couple of my friends take a look at it. IST majors and just regular computer techies that spend most of their time on macs and have never seen the way that my was acting. I would get to the Gray screen with the Apple then it would flash through the apple, a folder, a question mark, and the a circle with a slash through it. It would just rapidly fire through those icons.
So as a fix I cleared everything and put SL on it, with the help of a friend and everything worked great until a couple days ago March 2010. Where my SL crashed on me. I was a little upset about this, but i’m working on getting it fixed. I’m planning on reinstalling SL. However my friends and I believe that I might have to get a new Hard drive. But I used DiskWarrior and other disk utilities and nothing seems to be showing up.