IOS simulator slow with Mavericks

Question

I'm the only one to have a slow simulator since the last OSX update (Mavericks)?

• I've tried to reset simulator
• I've tried to switch on/off animation speed in Debug main bar
• I've tried to draw my game with a simple moving quad
• I've tried to run my application on IOS7, IOS6 with Retina and without on the simulator
• My application isn't slow when I run it on an Android device

Simulator is always slow, on the previous OSX version I haven't got any problems :/ (My application is a game using OpenGL ES2)

Thanks!

Answer 1

I met the performance issue on simulator prior to iOS7.

Apple provides the solution in Xcode 5.1 Release Note (Page 4: iOS Simulator)

sudo sysctl -w kern.timer.coalescing_enabled=0

Now the simulator flies!

Answer 2

Well, the iOS 6.1 simulator seems slower in Mavericks. I am still using XCode 4.6.3 and iOS 6.1, but on Mavericks now.

I'm not ready to upgrade my app to using iOS 7 (I'm holding off until I have enough time to handle any issues that may pop up in the upgrade).

A reasonable answer seems to the deleted one, he said that if you do use Mavericks, make sure to use the iOS 7 simulator, as it doesn't seem to have the slowdown issue.

Edit:

Having installed XCode 5, happily there were no problems in the upgrade with my project (I was afraid because of my experience with the Beta). The iOS 7 simulator on Mavericks runs at least as fast as the iOS 6.1 simulator on Lion.

When you're running in the simulator, make sure not to select Retina, because the retina emulator is many times slower than the non-retina emulator. This is likely due to the fact that it has that many more pixels to fill, and the iOS simulators don't use hardware rendering.