Phoronix compared the performance figures of Mac OS X 10.5.5 with those of Ubuntu 8.10. They conclude: "Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 Leopard had strong performance leads over Canonical's Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex in the OpenGL performance with the integrated Intel graphics, disk benchmarking, and SQLite database in particular. Ubuntu on the other hand was leading in the compilation and BYTE Unix Benchmark. In the audio/video encoding and PHP XML tests the margins were smaller and no definitive leader had emerged. With the Java environment, Sunflow and Bork were faster in Mac OS X, but the Intrepid Ibex in SciMark 2 attacked the Leopard. These results though were all from an Apple Mac Mini."
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Member since:2005-11-11
People usually complain about two things when it comes to OS X and performance. 1) It's a microkernel, thus according to Linus it must suck ... those may be true, but they aren't reflected in actual tests. If microkernels were so bad, you would assume that it would trail behind an OS like Linux. Yet, it doesn't
OSX does not use a microkernel.
from http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/bsdcon02/ful... : At the heart of Darwin is its kernel, xnu. xnu is a monolithic kernel based on sources from the OSF/mk Mach Kernel, the BSD-Lite2 kernel source, as well as source that was developed at NeXT ... xnu is not a traditional microkernel as its Mach heritage might imply ... the kernel is in fact monolithic - Loius Gerbarg, Apple Computer
Whatever thse benchmarks may say, they say nothing at all about the performance of microkernel vs monolithic kernel.
Member since:
2005-07-07
Two things left a major impression on me as I read the results. People usually complain about two things when it comes to OS X and performance. 1) It's a microkernel, thus according to Linus it must suck. 2) HFS+ is a relic, slow, etc.
Now both of these may be true, but they aren't reflected in actual tests. If microkernels were so bad, you would assume that it would trail behind an OS like Linux. Yet, it doesn't. It keeps up and at times exceeds it. The SQlite benchmark just shows how large the performance delta can be. If HFS+ was so useless compared to "modern" filesystems, you'd expect it to be left in the dust. It isn't, and in bonnie++ it actually exceeds ext3 by a sizeable margin.
As for OpenGL performance, I've always found Mac OS X to have excellent OpenGL support and performance. The only application I've used where it was slower on OS X than on Linux, has been Matlab.
All in all, I found that article very educational.