[Monterey] [MacOS 12] Large slowdown experienced on Monterey

It looks like both have an Exception being raise or is this somehow irrelevant?
(They can be real slow)

Irrelevant. For same code, it should take “kind of” the same time. The drop of the speed seems to lie in the OS part.

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We measured the times of our Xojo workflows on a Mac Mini M1 with a Big Sur and a Monterey partition (and an iMac Pro for comparison).

With Monterey, every step is slower, sometimes very clear. The Xojo IDE is created with Xojo, so Xojo probably uses (I guess) the same runtime as the apps created. And then we have the same delays in our apps …

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Thanks for the investigations!

Looks like there is definite slowdown across the board, I wonder if this is one of many slowdowns.

Perhaps Xojo is able to shed some light, if they are seeing the same issue.

You’re most welcome, Glad the get the conversation started :slight_smile:

Have you tried the same code in a concole app? Just to make sure it’s not the UI that slows the app.

It should be a general rule that a console app be faster. Console uses pure underlying Unix, whereas a desktop app makes use of macOS graphical interface.

I have not tested a console app yet

I’ve seen reports online about Monterey slowing down in general, maybe this is what you’re seeing with your app?

https://www.macintouch.com/post/20419/macos-monterey-slowdown-bugs/

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Its possible John, thanks for the report.

Perhaps Xojo can comment on if they have found similar issues

There is the problem with the changing cursors that surely also affects apps made with Xojo. The second problem is that doing Spotlight searches increases the memory of Finder.

What is really odd is that folderitem access is so much slower on Monterey than on High Sierra. I still need to do more testing there.

Are both file systems APFS?

No, High Sierra is on HFS and a slow combo drive (is this the correct name for the combination of SSD and conventional hard disk?). The Air is an M1 one.

That’s the reason I asked. HFS was in many ways faster than APFS, so I’m not surprised by your result.

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That’s really sad.

The general gist of APFS is that it is more reliable than HFS, but it comes with a performance hit.

I had hoped that Apple would invest in optimizing it’s performance, but I think that ship has sailed now.

Thanks for your reply Greg,

Both of our mac’s tested with the above traces from xcode, are using APFS

Where the 10.15 is super quick, and 12 is very slow

They are identical spec, one on 10.15, one on 12, bought in the same order from Apple.

Any more thoughts?

Thank you all

In our tests (see above) all scenarios were with APFS.
That would mean that APFS is significantly slower with Monterey than with BigSur …

I also updated the iMac Pro on Monterey, by the way. With that, Xojo was running unacceptably slow (load Project, first run) on our largest project. So back again.

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Thanks for the tests Andre!

I can also see a slowdown when conducting this test with our biggest project on MacOS 12, and not on MacOS 10.15:

  1. Load the project

  2. Run the project

I think the engineers at Xojo will see the problem too. At least the IDE is a very large project. If they load this with Monterey, the delay must be very noticeable. The question is: Is the cause in the Apple file system or in the way Xojo uses it. Or whatever.

We have to hope…