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From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: System 7 Slowness: Printing
Message-ID: <1991Jun19.175431.27097@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 19 Jun 91 17:54:31 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Originator: steve@violet.berkeley.edu

I've had several suggestions about speeding up system
7. Most of them didn't apply (I didn't have virtual
memory turned on, etc.). I've increased the cache to
512 to see if that helps. The IIci has a separate video
board; using the onboard memory for video could, it was
suggested slow things down with system 7. Turning off file
sharing had little effect on speed, and it isn't acceptable
since I need to access the IIci over our network.

Someone asked me if I installed on a clean drive. I didn't,
but I had to reinstall after removing my old system since
I was getting results which looked like a corrupted system
file. I doubt that the disk is fragmented since I recently
defragmented it before upgrading to system 7. I won't be
able to do that again until SUM II comes out with a new
version.

However, the most annoying thing is the slowness in printing.
I sent two similar simple text documents to our laserprinter.
One from my Mac II running 6.0.4 took 20 seconds to begin
printing. One from our IIci running system 7 took 45 seconds
to begin printing. Assuming that the printer processing time
is roughly constant, that means that system 7 is taking 25
seconds longer to get the file off. Both are printing in the
background. Presumably the difference would have been even
greater with system 7 on the II and system 6.0.4 on the IIci.

Did Apple rush to get system 7 out before optimizing its
performance? If not, can anyone explain what is going on
or, better yet, suggest a way to speed things up? Not many
of us paid $100 for system 7 to turn our Macs into slugs.

Steve Goldfield
College of Engineering
UC Berkeley