Xserve Outperforms Sun, SGI, Windows

Pahroza writes "Xinet has released their 2002 benchmark configurations, with tests including output generation and AppleShare file serving. Xserve was only bested by machines sporting at least twice as many CPUs as the two it was using. MacCentral is also running a story on the results, and you can download a PDF of the benchmarked configurations."

Comments

You guys have no idea what you are criticizing..

[Anonymous Coward]

We use xinet software on SGIs and Solaris machines long before they ported full-press to OS X. We have an Irix box that is 4 years old running xinet. For a long time, to get better Appleshare than Apple was to run on a unix machine running Full-Press.

So this is not a matter of Xinet writing software optimized on OS X. That is not true. Full-Press does not rely on the built in OS's capabilities for AFP but its own. OSXs version is about less than 2 years old. In fact, I believe most of FullPress implementations run on SGI.

The benchmarks are quite impressive because you are dealing heavy I/O (pushing 600 megs and 1 gig files) are normal in this business.

Re:thoughts

[dhovis]

3. The one PC platform box was a dual PIII 1.4Ghz. Not exactly the performance leader in dual CPU PC servers.

Actually, when it comes to 1U servers, it is. Go check Dell's website. The Poweredge 1650 is Dell's fastest 1U machine and it offers 1 or 2 1.4GHz Pentium IIIs. PIIIs are still commonly used in servers, because the P4 is a power hog and doesn't actually give you a speed boost. Remember that the PIII is actually about 50% faster than the P4 at the same clock speed. Intel's server optimized processor is the Xeon, and that is just a Pentium III with boatloads of cache. You can't find them in 1U servers, either.

4. The benchmarks were all runnning one server app, Xinet's own fullpress.

What exactly do you expect Xinet to use for benchmarking? They need to have an answer when people ask "what hardware runs your software best?" Read the article, it does not go around drooling over the XServe. It says how big of a shop each server is good for. It specifically says that the XServe is a good choice for small to medium size graphic shops. Nothing more. It is of significantly more interest how much the 2x1GHz XServe outperforms the 2x1GHz Powermac G4. To quote from Xinet's site:

Why Publish These Tests?

Xinet believes it is important to publish current, accurate, detailed information concerning the performance of our software on the server platforms we support.

By publishing this data, Xinet hopes to assist customers in choosing the systems that are appropriate for their needs, and to ensure smooth integration of Xinet products into their workflows. Xinet's Benchmarked Configurations are the result of extensive testing in the dedicated Xinet lab. Xinet hopes customers will use this data as a guide to the performance they can expect from various server-based workflows.

Re:when will we learn.

[Anonymous Coward]

as far as I can tell this bentchmark says that a Mac is good at Photoshop.

As far as I can tell you didn't bother to read the article. The machines were serving photoshop files to the clients, not running photoshop.

What this tells us is that the Xserve is great for small and medium prepress and design shops. And that's all it claimed to tell us.

As an admin for a medium sized ad agency, these benchmarks are telling me exactly what I want to know.

Less Biased Benchmarks

[hotsauce]

WebBench runs 60% faster on an Xserve than on a comparable IBM eServer running Linux. BLAST runs up to 19 times faster than on a comparable Sun Fire. Disk I/O is 50% faster than on a comparable Dell PowerEdge.

I know it is kewl to doubt everything on /. but perhaps you can show benchmarks that dispute these numbers?