Speed Test: Lion vs. Snow Leopard

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8DTFdw7Q7Qe”]

Lifehacker has conducted a series of tests to see which is faster: Lion or Snow Leopard. As you can see in the video above, the two operating systems do about the same in almost every category tested, but Snow Leopard weasels out the win almost every time. To be fair, most categories were won by a very small margin. Lifehacker summarizes:

Boot	1:32	1:25
Compress a ~900MB File	0:51	0:59
Decompress a ~900MB File	0:10	0:09
Duplicate a ~900MB File	0:09	0:09
Encoder a Movie for iPhone in Quicktime X	0:56	0:53
Launch 9 Applications	0:59	0:37
Open 10 Tabs in Safari	0:15	0:17
Total Time	4:43+	4:29

Snow Leopard was built for speed and Lion was built to add functionality. It’s great to see Lion isn’t exactly slipping away on the speed end of things. How’s the speed on your end?

The following tests were performed on a 2.66 GhZ iMac with 4GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive connected to the internet over Wi-Fi at a maximum speed of 60mbps.

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