X vs 9: System stability

[griffman]

MacFixIt is running a poll regarding the stability of your OS X system in the last 40 hours of usage. They ran a similar poll last year regarding OS 9. The question asked was:Approximately how many times has your Mac running Mac OS X had a crash or kernel panic, requiring a restart, in the last 40 hours of using it?While the poll is still open [vote] (http://www.macfixit.com/quickpoll/viewresults.shtml/), the results are pretty interesting already:Number of times crashed OS 9 OS X
-------------------------------------------
Never 20% 75%
Once or twice 36% 20%
Three to six 25% 4%
Seven to twelve 10% 1%
More than twelve 10% 1%Total votes are close; 7,057 for OS 9 and 6,556 for OS X, so there's no sample size issue...

Basically, in a 40 hour period, nearly three-quarters of OS X users had no crashes at all. Only 6% (86 people out of 6,556) had more than three.

By contrast, if you use OS 9, you stand an 80% chance of having at least one crash in 40 hours, and fully 45% of OS 9 users (or 3,119 people out of 7,057) had three or more crashes in that time. And note that these aren't the "force quit an app" crashes; these are full-blown restart the computer crashes.

Say what you like about OS X, but it certainly appears to have the stability advantage on its side!

-rob.

[Thundarr]

The poll is a bit of a reflection of why I use OSX over OS9. Many of the things that I do rely on stability, I need the computer to not crash in the middle of things. If it does, I must return to square one. I functioned in OS9, but did many things on UNIX boxes. Now, I cruise in OSX. Stability, among the many other benefits of OSX, is certainly a big factor in my usage.

[Phil St. Romain]

Just no contest on stability. I've never had a hard crash--not even with PB. I've logged out then back in a few times because various software wouldn't let go of RAM and things eventually got slow. It doesn't even occur to me any more that the computer might crash. There's a real freedom in that! :)

Phil

[Andrew LaGow]

The stability of this platform is simply huge. It's so easy to forget what a nightmare OS 9 could be sometimes.

There was a point during the bad old days (1996 or so) when Guy Kawasaki put a beautiful spin on OS 7.5's frailties. He said whenever his Mac crashed he knew he'd been working too long anyway and it was time to take a break. Now I can overwork to my heart's content!

Andy

[level9]

Stability? Nah:
-bought G4/867 on Oct 6
-approximately 30 days later, updated OS (restart required)
-another 30 days, updated OS (restart required)
-52 days, made the mistake of restarting instead of sleeping
-89 days, shut down because of thunderstorm
Not one kernel panic.

On the other hand, the same exact machine at work crashes once a day (OS9.2.2).

[hschickel]

I have a customer who was running a 4D server, a Filemaker Server, and Apple File sharing on a B&W G3400/128 running OS8.6. The system was of course extremely overloaded and very unstable. It was preventatively restarted once a day and it crashed once or twice a day besides. They asked me to fix the problem.

My first thought was of course to split the work over 3 servers as Filemaker and 4D recommend standalone machines for their services. This is, however, a small shop with only 10 client machines so I thought I would try something a little more cost effective first.

I purchased for them a copy of OSX and another 384MB of RAM at a cost of ~$250 combined. 4D had a free upgrade to 4DServer 6.7.5 for OSX and my customer had an OSX version of Filemaker Server with their volume license. The server came down for 3 hours for the upgrades.

60 days later the B&W is still running and adding uptime. I noticed this because we are bringing it down tomorrow to upgrade to X.1.4. Amazingly, OSX's multitasking abilities allow this relatively low end machine to juggle 3 different servers with very acceptable performance. (In a relatively low volume environment.)

Go Apple - OSX saved my customer at least $3000.

Hugh

ps - the customer is ecstatic over the performance. We converted one client at the same time and that user will switch back over her, "cold dead body."

OSX is ready for primetime for many "pro" users. "Pro" being defined as users who make money with their macs.