Since 1.6, SL has become more sluggish and bloated with every patch. The application bundle has gone from around 15 megabytes to over 90. It runs slower now on my shiny new MacBook Pro than it used to on my then-top-of-the-line G3 iBook back in the day. Most of the time, you can't move your avatar at all due to latency, which can easily rise into 6500 msec roundtrips (this is on a good DSL line with no other traffic on it). Performance is absolutely dreadful and seems to be more network- than CPU- or GPU-bound.

Looking at CPU usage, SL is pegging core #1 and strangely does not seem to be aware that core #2 even exists.

What's even stranger is that if you run SL on the *same hardware* under Windows XP, the difference in performance and playability is night and day.

I think it's time Linden Labs stopped making excuses. Instead, hire and fire some people, do whatever it takes, just make the Mac viewer stop sucking. Please.