Wednesday, November 6, 2013

OSX 10.9 - Mavericks - Not Ready Yet!

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I’ve only run the update to Mavericks, and haven’t yet tested a system that had a clean OS install. To be fair, I'm hearing from some that it's great. But I and many others in IT have seen issues with it to the point where I'm recommending waiting on this upgrade. The results just aren't consistent enough yet.

There are a couple of rough edges to it; one that’s not a big deal and one that, for network users, is a big deal.
  • Not a Big Deal: I have to keep re-selecting my Time Machine Drive from a list of available drives. 
  •  A Very Big Deal for Network Users: Communications with SMB-mounted network volumes is much slower. Some routines that I run are taking 4-5 times longer since the upgrade. The problem seems to be with conflicts between the new standard imposed in Mavericks to use SMB2 as default with other drivesto which it's connecting. One suggested workaround is to use CIFS instead of SMB, which reportedly forces it to use SMB1. I'm still testing this...
A Mavericks Tip: Some like having the menu show on multiple displays (for those who use them). However, the way it works is a distraction for me because the Dock keeps moving fairly unpredictably between displays. I turned that feature off by going into System Preferences, then Mission Control, and then removing the check mark for Displays have separate Spaces. That change requires a restart to become effective.
So, I recommend waiting on Mavericks for now, and will post a subsequent blog post and comments to this post when it looks ready. 

3 comments:

Nick Nicholaou said...

10.9.1 Update: Our testing shows that the OS is now as slow to read local folders and files as it became with this OS for network volumes. In addition, the Trash folder has become unpredictable. We'll talk with Apple's engineers about this and report back.

Nick Nicholaou said...

Another update on 10.9.1: I just spent an hour with Apple's upper-level folks, and all they could say is that they're working on it. Over and over again.

Nick Nicholaou said...

I've been working with 10.9.2 since it was released and see no improvement. I've lost hope they'll resolve this, and with new systems coming with Mavericks pre-installed, have to say it's okay. But I caution users that they'll notice it takes awhile to open files and read folder contents at times.