QuarkXPress More Efficient in the Background Than InDesign
I run a lot of programs at the same time. Perhaps you do, too.
This morning, I was curious to see how much of my Mac’s processor was being used by the applications that I had launched earlier but were now idling in the background. Specifically, I wondered about QuarkXPress 8 and InDesign CS5. (Yes, I use both regularly.)
Upon waking my Mac from its overnight sleep, I launched Activity Monitor and saw this:
InDesign CS5 was using an average of 3.9% of my Mac’s processor.
QuarkXPress 8 was using an average of 1.2% of my Mac’s processor.
Neither application had any documents open. As I was working in other applications, I noticed that InDesign kicked up to 4.2%, while QuarkXPress remained at 1.2%.
Then I got curious about RAM, since whatever RAM being tied up by these applications would not be available to the active applications without the system swapping some RAM and/or hard drive space — another thing that slows down performance.
It turned out that the memory (RAM) being used by InDesign while idling was more than three times higher than QuarkXPress, at 140MB vs. 46MB — again, even though I wasn’t using either application and hadn’t for hours.
If you use both QuarkXPress and InDesign (any versions), you may want to have a look for yourself and post your results in the Comments section below. Just launch Activity Monitor and sort by “% CPU”. This could be interesting…
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
I just tested my macbook pro 17″ i7 with 8GB RAM. Since I have ID CS3,4 and 5I tested them all at once. I had each program launched with no documents open and then switched to the finder.
Here are my results.
InDesign CS5 3.1% CPU, 296mb RAM
InDesign CS4 6.4% CPU, 222.6mb RAM
InDesign CS3 4.4% CPU, 170mb RAM
QuarkXPress 8 0.9% CPU, 181.5mb RAM
Since i have a new laptop all of the benchmarks are pretty close to each other. It would be intersting to see what it would be like on an older machine.
On my Intel MacBook Pro 15″ 2.33 Ghz with 2 MB RAM:
InDesign CS4 3.5 % CPU, 206 MB RAM
QuarkXPress 8.16 .5% CPU, 167 MB RAM
In terms of CPU usage at least, ID’s literally SEVEN TIMES as much. Amazing.
Older machine:
A dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 with 6.5 GB RAM:
InDesign CS4: 7.5% CPU — 242mb RAM usage
QuarkXPress 8.16: 1.4% CPU — 182mb RAM usage
wow.