Scores lower in safe mode?

Joe Kissell's Avatar

Joe Kissell

29 Apr, 2011 08:26 AM

I'm puzzled by this: when I reboot my Mac in Safe Mode (holding down the Shift key) and then run Geekbench, my scores are invariably MUCH lower than they usually are. As in, 3612 in Safe Mode vs. 9244 after a normal boot. I'd think that since fewer background processes are running when in Safe Mode, the scores should be higher.

I'd really like to understand what's going on—thanks for any light you can shed on this for me.

  1. Support Staff 1 Posted by John on 02 May, 2011 02:19 AM

    John's Avatar

    Hi Joe,

    Thanks for your message. While Safe Mode does start fewer processes and kernel extensions, Safe Mode is also less performant than Regular Mode (due to extra overhead imposed by Safe Mode). In my experience Geekbench scores are at least 30% lower in Safe Mode than Regular Mode.

    Cheers,
    John

  2. 2 Posted by Joe Kissell on 02 May, 2011 06:25 AM

    Joe Kissell's Avatar

    John,

    Thanks very much for your response. Can you tell me where I can learn more about the "extra overhead" in Safe Mode? I know about Apple's page (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564) explaining what's disabled in Safe Mode, but it doesn't hint at any overhead, and I haven't yet found any references explaining why or in what way Safe Mode uses extra RAM and so forth. I'd love to get a definitive answer about what extra things are sucking up system resources in Safe Mode.

    Joe

  3. Support Staff 3 Posted by John on 03 May, 2011 05:33 AM

    John's Avatar

    Hi Joe,

    Unfortunately I don't have any references regarding the performance overhead of Safe Mode; most of my information has been gleaned from informal discussions with other software developers.

    Sorry I couldn't be more helpful!

    Cheers,
    John

  4. John closed this discussion on 09 Jul, 2012 03:02 AM.

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