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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 12 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.556s | source | bottom
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brendangregg ◴[22 May 20 22:34 UTC] No.23277837[source]▶
Adding network calls to syscalls like exec() is utterly insane. This road can lead to bricked laptops where you can't run anything to fix it (imagine an unexpected network error that the code doesn't handle properly). And crackers will just use ways to overwrite running instruction text to avoid the exec().

The comments on the article are annoying: it good that there's a mini way to reproduce, but please, use some further debugging like tcpdump (it still exists on osx, right?). Last time I summarized osx debugging was https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/analyzing-os-x-syste...

I'd also stress test it: generate scripts in a loop that include random numbers and execute them.

replies(5): >>23278280 #>>23279465 #>>23279751 #>>23279958 #>>23303509 #
xvector ◴[22 May 20 23:28 UTC] No.23278280[source]▶
There is no excuse for this except for sheer, utter incompetence. Everyone involved in writing and shipping this should be ashamed of themselves.
replies(3): >>23278582 #>>23278927 #>>23279035 #
1. pmarreck ◴[23 May 20 01:36 UTC] No.23279035[source]▶
There’s going to be a big exodus of open source developers going to Linux-powered platforms instead of the standard Mac laptop because of this ridiculousness
replies(2): >>23279254 #>>23279298 #
2. cageface ◴[23 May 20 02:19 UTC] No.23279254[source]▶
This is happening at my company already because docker performance on Macs is terrible.
replies(2): >>23279833 #>>23283187 #
3. jfkebwjsbx ◴[23 May 20 02:28 UTC] No.23279298[source]▶
> the standard Mac laptop

There is nothing standard about a Mac laptop, both technically and in market share.

replies(2): >>23279489 #>>23283109 #
4. saagarjha ◴[23 May 20 03:05 UTC] No.23279489[source]▶
At Silicon Valley technology companies? A Mac is generally the computer that you're likely to get.
replies(1): >>23281840 #
5. millstone ◴[23 May 20 04:09 UTC] No.23279833[source]▶
On the one hand, of course it is, because Macs are slow at running Linux stuff in the same way that Linux is slow at running non-Linux stuff.

On the other hand, Apple should decide if they care about Docker performance. The answer seems to be "a little" (Hypervisor.framework) but much less than, say, Microsoft.

Apple doesn't talk about their future plans. Today we see stagnation, YET with spikes of exotic ideas (e.g. L4, which would permit efficient L4 Linux).

Per Apple's style, a big kernel change on the Mac side would absolutely be tied to a hardware change, to break things once and not twice. Build a new Mac with a Linux-friendly kernel (perhaps Linux, perhaps modified L4, or something new), put it on their beastly ARM CPUs, and I'm drooling.

Then again I don't work at Apple.

6. jfkebwjsbx ◴[23 May 20 10:41 UTC] No.23281840{3}[source]▶
Silicon Valley is a very small dot in the global scale.
replies(2): >>23281986 #>>23290666 #
7. saagarjha ◴[23 May 20 11:12 UTC] No.23281986{4}[source]▶
A fairly influential one, nonetheless.
replies(1): >>23282097 #
8. jfkebwjsbx ◴[23 May 20 11:32 UTC] No.23282097{5}[source]▶
Influential in technology output? Yeah. Influential in Mac market share? Not in the slightest.

Companies around the globe don’t care one bit about which laptops SV companies are buying.

9. pmarreck ◴[23 May 20 14:16 UTC] No.23283109[source]▶
Well, I'd say 90% of the computers I've seen at the last 10 confs I've attended were Macbook Pros

https://hackernoon.com/why-do-developers-run-macs-9ad81d58d1...

replies(1): >>23285228 #
10. pmarreck ◴[23 May 20 14:26 UTC] No.23283187[source]▶
Is that slowness possibly related to the OP's issue? And possibly might benefit from the same workarounds posted here?
11. jfkebwjsbx ◴[23 May 20 18:30 UTC] No.23285228{3}[source]▶
Look outside the US.
12. IshKebab ◴[24 May 20 10:48 UTC] No.23290666{4}[source]▶
It's not just Silicon Valley. In the last two companies I've worked in in the UK everyone had Macbooks.