Why PearPC is SO slow?!

[ARCHIVED] About PearPC, a mostly obsolete PPC Mac emulator for Windows and Linux to run MacOS X 10.1 up to 10.4. Using QEMU is now recommended.

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richardstephens
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Why PearPC is SO slow?!

Post by richardstephens »

Hello!

I'd like to ask this simple question (maybe, it's been already asked here) - why the hell is PearPC so extremely slow on my very fast machine?! My host hardware CPU is Intel Core i7-2600 @ 3.40 GHZ (4 logical + 4 real cores). The PC has 8 Gb of memory, NVidia GeForce GTX 570 video adapter and new SSD with W10 64-bit on it. Initially I tried PearPC 0.5.0 from the distant 2011. The OS installation process was very slow even on generous settings of the emulator (G3 CPU, max amount of DRAM, 50 ms for redraw interval). Then I switched to newer 0.6pre and increased redraw interval to 100 ms. Nothing has changed practically. Well, it became slightly faster but still works 10-15 times slower than the host system.

Now some fun part - I've been installing Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.6 for ~13-14 hours! :evil: (took one night + one morning). Ok, when it got installed it's still slow: all file read/write operations are performed at 300-400 kB/sec, the internet speed is limited to this value also. Although video renders without any noticeable delays (and the mouse moves almost without delays), I have to wait for several seconds to several minutes to, say, open Finder, mount .dmg image, copy some file from one folder to another etc. In comparison to PearPC another emulators such as SheepShaver and Basilisk II work much faster - not so fast as the host but I'm almost satisfied with them.

Well, I'm gonna give it up, erase PearPC from my HDD and forget it as a bad dream. But finally I'd like to know if there's something to do with PearPC to speed it up or not.
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adespoton
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Re: Why PearPC is SO slow?!

Post by adespoton »

To answer your question: PearPC is single core, and doesn't use graphics acceleration. This means that the hardware graphics are emulated as part of the single core thread. So everything it's emulating (all chips, hardware, interfaces, etc.) from a PowerPC Mac is being done in a single core.

That said, PearPC is an old emulator that hasn't really been maintained much in years. Most of us are using QEMU now, which is way more accurate, just as fast (or sometimes faster) and actively developed.

As for speeding up PearPC, enabling JIT in the settings will speed it up significantly. Since you didn't say what settings you're using, we don't know which options may help you speed it up.

But I've installed 10.4.6 PPC on PearPC 0.5pre in a little under 15 minutes on both Windows 7 and OS X, so there's something else dodgy going on in your situation. Even with JIT disabled, it shouldn't be that slow.
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