Open-Source Applications Slow Down System

ninepillars · 07-02-2008, 07:19 AM

Hi all,

I'm a relative Mac newbie--I've only been using them, on and off, for a couple of years. I'm familiar with installing applications, customizing the dock, checking system performance, etc.
Recently I've tried to use some FOSS apps on my little iMac at home: first Songbird alpha 0.6, then NeoOffice (which didn't even work), then OpenOffice.org 2.4, and most recently Firefox 3.0.
My problem is that whenever I try to run ANY of these applications, they take a long time to load, and when they do they are very slow and the fan on my Mac goes crazy, running hot hot hot and LOUD until I shut it down. Firefox hung. This doesn't happen with any of the default software that came on the Mac (Safari, iTunes, etc.). I have no idea what could be causing this, unless perhaps it's because most of them use X11. Any ideas/advice?

Thanks in advance,
Cullen

**V0lt** · 07-02-2008, 09:13 AM

Looking at the specs in your profile, I'd say the most likely culprit is the PPC architecture of your processor. Not that it's particularly slow - I know how PPC works, but I would wager that most of those programs don't have many active developers working on the PPC version, and probably no time devoted to optimization, so you don't get as good performance on the ppc platform as you do on x86.

My school has some last-gen PPC imacs that are spec'd out as far as features go, but they just don't cut it when it comes to running modern applications. The cheap dell workstations get the job done much faster, regardless of what the mac evangelists of the IT department say.

sinclair_tm · 07-02-2008, 11:32 AM

I wouldn't blame the PPC. I have a 1.4 Ghz G4, and it runs NeoOffice just fine. The first thing I'd look at is the free space of the hard drive. I see you have a small drive to begin with, and then the RAM is on the low side. You need at least 10 gig free on your hard drive for the Mac to run at it's best, and even if you have the RAM requirement for the OS, anything under 1 Gig isn't enough to run a Mac well. I've never had any issues with NeoOffice, it's just slow to begin with, and it does have a PPC version and Intel version, and they are not cross platform. The biggest thing is make sure that you are downloading PPC versions of the software. Anything in X11 can be slower than standard apps. I don't use FF, so I don't know how that is, I tried OpenOffice once upon a time, couldn't get it to print, then I found NeoOffice and just have used that since. I do use The Gimp in X11, sans printing, and it runs well once open, it takes a while to load everything too. As for the CPU peg, I don't see that unless the app is chrunching something, just sitting there it has low over head. If you try running everything at once, then ya, it'll bog things down.

**V0lt** · 07-02-2008, 12:19 PM

That's pretty surprising - I would have thought 75gb would be plenty for a legacy system like this, but obviously your opinion counts much more than mine, since I haven't used an apple computer in years :)

sinclair_tm · 07-02-2008, 01:25 PM

Well, Being it's a G5, I'm suprised that has a drive smaller than 120gig. Then again, you can look to see how much drive space I have...

ninepillars · 07-04-2008, 07:52 AM

Hard drive space definitely isn't the problem, since there are still about 60GB free on this (my family's) machine. I'm tempted to agree with the PPC architecture theory, since the applications all run fine on my own Intel Celeron with only 500MB of RAM, and I've only ever used one of these apps at a time. As for NeoOffice, the disk image of that won't even mount for me... so possibly I downloaded the wrong version. I'll look into it a little further, but for now it seems I just won't be using any of those apps, except perhaps NeoOffice.
It's not even a big deal anyway... this machine is used 99% of the time for internet :p.

Thanks for all your help!