I am absolutely a Windows hater, but I've experienced the same problem in Linux, MacOS, Windows, BSD, you name it.

See for example Con Kolivas' famous rant about how Linux schedulers were ignoring the interactivity requirements of desktop usage, and resulted in a terrible experience with constant tiny freezes.

It seems to have improved these past years but beach balls used to be comically widespread on OS X. I'm not at all convinced OS X is in any better shape than Windows.

And OS X certainly doesn't have anywhere near all the kick ass monitoring tools that Windows as, such as the ones shown in this article.

You do know that OS X have DTrace?

And then with DTrace - instruments! https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/De...

not just "it has DTrace" it has one of the best implementations/supports of DTrace in any operating system.

It's quite impressive.

> And OS X certainly doesn't have anywhere near all the kick ass monitoring tools that Windows as, such as the ones shown in this article

It certainly helps that Intel really likes Windows, but I haven't seen Mac users complaining as much as Windows users do, so, it may be for lack of demand (and the bundling of dtrace, for ages).

Uhm I have a 40-core machine with 256GB of ram at work and I can make it completely unresponsive without taxing either ram or the cpu to 100% - we have a certain computational load that just destroys the CPU<->Ram bandwidth, so cpu usage is about 30-40%, ram sits at 50%, and yet the computer is completely unresponsive. It's exactly the same on both Windows Server and Linux - we're just running into hardware limits.

Interesting. I've been CPU mining on my old IVY bridge and i don't even notice it causing much performance drop. Free coins for me!

I'm reading your comment while upgrading brew. This prevents me from working because typing in Sublime Text slows down to a crawl during brew's compilations ;)

> my long standing gripes about Windows is that it just seems to have terrible multitasking compared to OSX.

Using both Macs and Linux laptops, I'm sometimes shocked at how the Mac sometimes locks up when the Linux machines degrade much more gracefully under heavy loads. I never dug too deep into it, but it feels like it's something with HFS+ under heavy IO. I hope APFS fixes that.

I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I'm pretty sure APFS does a lot of global locking, which would definitely explain at least some of that.

I just noticed now, 4 days late, that I wrote APFS but meant HFS+. Sorry.

Interesting. Back when I switched my Firefox builds from Core2 Duo T8300 @ 2.40 GHz + spinning disk + OS X to i7-950 @ 3.07GHz + SSD + Ubuntu, GUI responsiveness during Firefox build went from OK to bad. Canonical's support suggested getting a second computer as a build machine.

May be the machine too. I "feel" my Xeon desktop and my i3 laptop degrade more smoothly than the i7 laptop. It's entirely subjective, of course, but when I torture the machines the i3 go from usable to uncomfortable while the i7 goes very usable to unbearable. The Xeon goes from very usable to usable. Could be the i7 throttling more heavily from thermal issues.

Ever since I purged Dropbox from my life I haven't had intermittent UI lockups on macOS.

Interesting... One Mac here has Dropbox and the other has Microsoft's OneDrive. Maybe it's their fault.

This has little to nothing to do with multitasking.

OS X just slows everything down so you won't notice when something get stuck.

I've been a Mac user for 7 years now, my latest greatest MacBook Pro halts for a few seconds when I connect an external monitor and everything is frozen and unresponsive, like I'm looking at a screenshot of the system

OS multitasking is still usually shit...

That's at least excusable, unlike GUI freeze caused by termination of a number of processes which don't even use the GUI.

My ten year old crappy MacBook Pro doesn't do that. Weird.