Now that Haiku has entered the beta phase, and after the work over the past year or so spent fixing the majority of known kernel crashes and other general instabilities, it is high time we start paying more attention to the whole system’s performance.
Despite how “snappy” Haiku seems, most of its internals are really not so well optimized. This shows when running operations of any real intensity (disk, memory, or CPU.) While the new thread scheduler a few years ago removed some of the thread-related bottlenecks, in practice this just shifted the load to other bottlenecks.
So, let’s take an overview of this past month’s (and some earlier month’s) changes, to see how one optimizes an operating system.
Haiku always feels very fast and snappy, but in reality, many of us have that perception because we tend to not really use Haiku as much as we use Windows or Linux. I’m really glad the Haiku team acknowledges this, and is looking to address low-level performance issues that may not look sexy in a changelog, but that are oh so crucial for the overall feel of the operating system.
I typically test Haiku on a relatively slow AMD A4-5000 laptop… and the recent fixes have made a notable difference instability and performance though I’m sure there is more to come. It’s gone from this is too annoying to use, to I can deal with this at this point…
I’ve said this before – I’d use it daily if it would run Thunderbird, Openoffice and Firefox stable. That’s the core software I need to work with. I repeat, stable. These are big fat fish on a lean OS. Would be great.
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/libreoffice/haikuports/6/2/4.2/-/3/x86_64?bcguid=bc272-XWQD libreoffice is there.
Haiku has a few good stable email clients including beam, and its builtin email client, https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/preferences/e-mail.html , https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/beam/haikuports/1/2/-/-/8/x86_gcc2?bcguid=bc467-POXF , and others like mutt if you are so inclined.
Haiku does have bezilla, which is a bit ancient at this point, but it has plenty of good, stable browsers like qupzilla, being one example. And why not try out webpositive, and file bugs, to try and make its native browser better, 🙂
“stable” as in crashes every other min… lets get a beta release out with stability maintained before we start claiming that any of the browsers are stable.
As I noted stability is improved, memory use is still much much higher than it used to be (used to be able to install/boot in 256MB IIRC I realistically you need about 350-400Mb right now to boot without a swap file)
this is all well and good, love to see progress on haiku – but how about some basic accelerated 2d drivers? even aros has those..