How Fast Is It?--Mac OS X 10.0.4 Boot Time

On July 17 we posted a comparison of boot times and other times of Mac OS X 10.0.4 with those of Windows XP RC1. We ran Mac OS X on a Power Mac G4 533DP and Windows XP on a Compaq Presario 633 MHz Celeron. We made a major point of how slow the boot time of Mac OS X (102 seconds to login and 19 more to the Finder without launching Classic) was in comparison with Mac OS 9.1 and Windows XP RC1. The following day Apple CEO Steve Jobs promised in his Macworld keynote address that the next version of Mac OS X, i.e. v10.1, would focus on "...performance, performance and performance...." Indeed, he demoed v10.1 and it appeared very fast in comparison. We saw 10.1 rebooted at Macworld, timed it and reported that it was about twice as fast (60 seconds to login and a few seconds to the Finder) as 10.4.

Yesterday, Accelerate Your Mac (AYM) posted a reader report purporting to compare the speed of Mac OS X 10.0.4 with a beta of 10.1. We were struck by how fast this report claimed 10.0.4 was in booting from the power on chime to login (66 seconds) and from login to the Finder (6 seconds) with the same Power Mac G4 533 DP. These times are nearly twice as fast as we obtained for 10.0.4 and about the same as we observed for 10.1 at Macworld.

Thinking we might have erred somehow we reran our tests but included a new iBook (Dual USB) and a 450 MHz G4 Cube for comparison. We found that having an AirPort card installed significantly slowed the boot time and having any networking enabled with DHCP had some effect. Here are the results:

Time (sec) Power On Chime to Login/Login to Finder

Set Up	iBook (Dual USB)	G4 Cube	G4 533DP
All DHCP, AT On	162/33	96/20	102/21
Ethernet Manual, AT Off	141/30	88/21	83/21
E'net & AirPort Manual, AT Off	92/31	--	--

With ethernet connected, ethernet TCP/IP set for DHCP and AppleTalk on (first row of the table) Mac OS X takes longer to boot to login than with ethernet disconnected, ethernet TCP/IP set to manual and AppleTalk off (second row). Curiously, the G4 Cube booted faster to login (96 vs 102 seconds) than the 533DP but the 533DP is on a different network and has 2 drives to check during boot. The iBook was much slower to boot to login until AirPort was turned off and its TCP/IP set to manual instead of DHCP.

If one is not on an ethernet network or an AirPort network, boot time can be improved significantly by ensuring that TCP/IP for ethernet and AirPort in the Network system preference panel is set on "Manual" rather than "DHCP".

None of our boot to login times came close to the 66 seconds of the AYM report. In fact, it took 40-60 seconds just to get the blue screen, much less to the login panel. Our times from login to the Finder ran 20-33 seconds, again not even close to the 6 seconds in the AYM report. We can not explain the differences.

Anyway, we look forward to a much faster Mac OS X 10.1!