How is the performance of Haiku compared to BeOS? I know it’s not even alpha yet but I’m still curious.
I’d say it’s a pretty subjective question.
For many tasks, Haiku is clearly faster than BeOS - such as compiling software, etc. This is largely due to a better design for process creation/teardown than BeOS had. I also hear that Haiku’s OpenBFS is faster than the original BeOS BFS, although I don’t have benchmarks to prove this.
However, on older hardware, BeOS feels faster still (UI responsiveness, etc.), and I attribute this to certain optimizations and hacks that BeOS had in place to tweak the performance for this era of hardware. Since BeOS doesn’t even run on most modern hardware, for various reasons, it’s hard to compare apples to apples any more. But certainly when comparing older machines, there have been some decisions in Haiku that make it run slightly less efficiently (such as the app_server’s use of certain accelerated video features - or lack of use as it may be - that aren’t as relevant on newer hardware as they were on older hardware).
Also, Haiku still has a lot of debugging code enabled. For example, I have heard from several people, including my own personal experience, that disabling serial debugging in the kernel settings file can shave a couple seconds off the boot time. This seems irrelevant, but when the boot time is already 12 seconds, and you can speed it up by 2 seconds, that’s pretty significant! You’ll also occasionally run into a piece of hardware with a misbehaving driver, which will drag down the entire system… so you might find some people claiming it’s very slow as a result.
Anyhow, these are my personal opinions and impressions, I’m sure it varies between individuals.
I have noticed in the past half hour or so that copying files from my usb drive severely drags the system. Though no cpu usage is registered. (Gigabyte ga-x48-ds5). So there are a few issues yet. But it seems to be fast for me otherwise.