2014-05-15, 19:58
So I've been pulling my hair out for months over performance on my 2010 Mac Mini. The UI was sluggish, scrolling through the list of movies with artwork was really choppy. Playing video was fine, it was just the UI. I turned on dirty regions, didn't help. A windows desktop with almost identical specs ran like butter, so I tried installing Windows 7 on the Mini and as expected performance was much better. Had a number of other issues running Windows on it though, so I went back to OSX but couldn't figure out the slow UI
Last night I played around with every possible thing I could think of. Since I had debugging on, I noticed it was running at 5.00 FPS very consistently, and found some mentions on the forum of a framerate limiter that sometimes gets turned on, but nothing specific to my issue. I changed every setting that could conceivably have an impact on the UI, and finally after turning on "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen" it solved it. Quick snappy UI now running at 60 fps.
Is this a known issue with OSX? Most of the framerate limiter discussion I saw was related to running secondary apps that futzed around with the screen and made XBMC think it wasn't running in the foreground. I'm running a very vanilla 10.6.8 Snow Leopard install, no other apps installed besides Chrome and Snatch Server for using a iDevice as a mouse (and I shut down Snatch during all my testing), so it didn't seem like that was my problem. I'd done a totally clean install, including wiping out my userdata directory, and I hadn't explicitly turned that setting off, should it be on by default on OSX? Or is there just something screwy with mine that was causing it to be necessary?
Last night I played around with every possible thing I could think of. Since I had debugging on, I noticed it was running at 5.00 FPS very consistently, and found some mentions on the forum of a framerate limiter that sometimes gets turned on, but nothing specific to my issue. I changed every setting that could conceivably have an impact on the UI, and finally after turning on "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen" it solved it. Quick snappy UI now running at 60 fps.
Is this a known issue with OSX? Most of the framerate limiter discussion I saw was related to running secondary apps that futzed around with the screen and made XBMC think it wasn't running in the foreground. I'm running a very vanilla 10.6.8 Snow Leopard install, no other apps installed besides Chrome and Snatch Server for using a iDevice as a mouse (and I shut down Snatch during all my testing), so it didn't seem like that was my problem. I'd done a totally clean install, including wiping out my userdata directory, and I hadn't explicitly turned that setting off, should it be on by default on OSX? Or is there just something screwy with mine that was causing it to be necessary?