I don't know if this is in any way specific to OSX, but the general forum being spilled with non-technical mumbo jumbo, I guess I'll try here...
What determines the sector load times? I have a slow CPU (G4 800) so that could explain why sectors take 10-15 seconds to load, in most cases. This is VERY annoying especially if on pursuit, or if someone is chasing you! (since they'll be on the other side of the WH waiting for you even though you made it to the WH sooner).

I've thought of network traffic, but there really can't be that much of data to transfer to and fro. I've reduced textures to 'low' so they would load much faster, but no avail. In every case, I get way too long sector load times, and the vendetta task is using up all the CPU it can all the time nonetheless...

so, what gives?

Where are you counting the load time from ??
From the begining of the 'jump' animation or the time it takes for the blue loading bar to cross the screen and load ?

How much system memory have you? It could be you need some more, osX uses quite a bit.

Basically, the loadscreen is waiting for all the objects and their states in the new sector and it is instantiating them by allocating memory and initializing the memory and loading textures/meshes that have not already been loaded. The most time spent is loading/decoding the textures, so having a faster harddrive and faster cpu and faster video card (to load textures into video ram) all contribute to faster load-times. We are working on ways to make this faster but it's low priority.

When you jump into a sector with a w/h would it be possible to have the sector at the other side of the w/h load in the background while you were flying across the sector too said w/h ?

That's something I've wanted to do, but it requires a big change to our network protocol and server architecture.