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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."
Dedicated to #trolls and all their spam
Show me some less biased benchmarks, please.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Will corporations really take Apple seriously as a contender in the server market? This market has traditionally been dominated by Sun, among others. It seems by these performance graphs that Apple is really at the same level as the other major contenders as far as speed. Given that it has fewer CPU's, it is probably cheaper than some of the better-performing ones tested.
Will companies really start using Apple's Xserve to replace Sun or other servers?
Courtesy of Apple... coming in second to dead last, with lots of machines beating your ass is not "outperform". Talk about "THINK DIFFERENT"
It is 10pm Do you know where your karma is Right Let us get startedIn order to get maximum karma from Slashdot posting you can follow a few simple guidelines The University you go to Regardless of where you actually study saying that youre at MIT automagically gains you 2 Slashdot like the glorified student notice board that it is has a special place in its heart for anything from MIT whether it be a teddy bear stuffed with a switch or some wankers wrapping a yellow banner with elvish text around the main dome Even if you didnt go to university qualify every comment with a My professor told me to bask in the warm fuzzy glow of 2 Insightful Linux The basis of the Slashdot Experience Claiming you run Linux also gets you 1 Interesting It doesnt really matter if youve never actually installed it or your Red Hat box still doesnt have PPP running after 2 years of reading FAQs The important bit is Youre part of the community You can bathe in the refelected glory of years of shoddy buggy code You are exempt from the Microsoft penalty see below as of course your Win 98 install is only used for playing games And reading Slashdot And using MS Word And Photoshop And Microsoft Slashbots and the editors hate Microsoft Period Use of a symbol in every iteration of their trademarks gets you a 4 Funny Even though it is far from original it still manages to raise a grin in those people reading Slashdot between episodes of Cowboy Bebop You will get a 1 Flamebait or Troll for any post even hinting that Microsoft products are any good useful intuitive user friendly You will also quickly be shot down with replies about how good GNOME and KDE are which will then in turn erupt into a flame war Freedom Privacy YRO The bread and butter of Slashdot It fits in sublimely with the whole Linux thing Youll get a 3 Informative for any post containing the Ben Franklin quote about sacrificing essential liberty It makes no difference that the quote is totally irrelevant in the modern world Hey youve got karma Miscredting the quote will not end up in a karma penalty as has been demonstrated countless times You will gain extra karma if you make reference to your experiences of being wiretapped by the NSA and throwing in a vague link to Echelon black helicopters or Tin Foil Hat Linux Include a link to the First Amendment for a 1 Interesting mod Give yourself a pat on the back if you manage to include some extra raging paranoia with no evidence to back it up Nice BSD If you use it dont mention it on Slashdot Most of the Linuxusing friendless wonders that inhabit Slashdot wouldnt know quality and stability if it strolled up and kicked them in the throat with a size 13 HiTec Magnum boot Any mention of how a Firewall running OpenBSD with pf is far superior to Linuxs pathetic offering will soon see you as 1 Troll Much like the post youre reading now Yearning for yesteryear Although most comments are written by first year wannabeCSguru students or links to goatsecx there is still the fallout dregs of the dot com boom lurking around slashdot You can get 5 Insightful for telling how you were so badly treated after the bubble burst Whining about the lack of jobs where you get paid to fire foam darts at colleagues is a good start Dont forget to mention how youve now been out of work for months It starts a Im about to graduate and theres nothing going fuckfest which can spill over into hundreds of comments Although all the staff who were any good simply got hired into another company it makes Good Karma Senseto hide the fact that your passing familiarity with Perl and C simply cant get you a job This is also a prime opportunity to show your egregious personality as Slashdot rewards arrogance and elitism DONT FORGET TO MOD ME DOWN
So the benchmark only tested them on Photoshop, which is a AltVec optimized applicaiton from the beginning? That and where is the rest of the benchmark data? Doesn't seem to be a real fair comparison.
(see subject line)
Show me a price/performace comparison please.
And make shure to include some "crappy" Dual Intel and AMD machines!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The XServe is a server - and 50% of this benchmark test is rating how fast it opens up files in Photoshop? WHO CARES! Its a server, tell me how much faster it is at routing mail, serving files through apache, backing up data, etc. benchmark it doing things that a server does! This benchmark is useless IMHO.
Ended up buying the wife a couple Mac's to do here art on and such. Never got her to use the Linux box, or her Windows box much. Got her that Mac and she is on it all the time, working in Photoshop and using her tablet and stuff (guess they are more intiative for artists, course I am lost on the thing sometimes, end up using the command prompt a lot ;). The thing that struck me was the price was about the cost of a lowend PC from say Dell or something. So assuming their servers are prices likewise there shouldn't be a steep price curve anymore.
Dual AMD 1U Servers with identical specs to Apple's Xserve can be had sub-$1000 Xserve costs $5000. Compare the performance of FIVE AMD machines to the Xserve.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Let me start by saying that I'm an apple fan, I own two recent macintoshes (a g3/400mhz pismo laptop and a g4/550mhz desktop). I like apple, i like osx... I'm crazy in this way... that being said...
... i mean the executives look and say "gee this machines is only using two 1ghz processors, and its almost as fast as this one using 2 2.4ghz processors". I mean as far as a breakdown by mzh apple did great almost twice as many requests per mhz. however when the price/performance breakdown was computed apple came out with a price problem, it cost almost twice as much...
I've been itching to get my hands on one of these to test with, but since Apple couldn't get me one I went ahead and had them send over a dual 1ghz g4 tower to test nBLAST with. My feeling being since most of nBLAST does is cpu dependent the distinction is minor.
I went ahead and set up a number of machines, but I'm only going to talk about two.
a 1u dual 2.4ghz intel box with 1.5gigs of ram (custom)
a dual 1ghz g4 tower with 1.5gigs of ram
I created a number of standard BLAST queries and ran them against both machines multiple times and compared the results. To summarize the dual 2.4 edged out the mac for queries going to nBLAST (which apple optimized) and trounced the mac for other queries (non-optimized). This is still impressive
apple, when will you learn, you might be able to charge more for those fancy cases on the desktop, especially during a boom, but during a bust, noone cares what their rackmounts look like.
_
b
If you are talking "beige box" pricewatch machine, then sorry but that isn't comparing apples to apples (no pun intended). They are benching major manufactuers file servers. While a "beige box" is great for a mom and pop or small shop, most corporatations aren't quite ready to run them for production file servers. Yes that is stupid, yes I don't agree with it, cause they are just as good. But this article is comparing MAJOR brands.
I hate reading that such-and-such has released statistics showing that xyz is faster than abc, when I know next to nothing about such-and-such.
..."
m . etails.html):
/selling to one of their key markets...)
So wondering what I could find out quickly:
According to their homepage:
"...Xinet is the leading developer of prepress networking software.
(http://www.xinet.com/)
and if you go looking for it - '2002 testing details' (deeplink: http://www.xinet.com/benchmarks/benchmarks.2002/b
"...Xinet's Benchmarked Configurations measure network throughput by Macintosh clients opening and saving Photoshop files stored on the server..."
Given who they are (a company who makes software for an Industry Apple has a significant presence in) and how they test (using Macintosh clients) how they obtained their benchmark results (and why photoshop gets in to them) is a little easier to understand.
(I have to wonder if this is why Apple Keynotes have photoshop demos to show off their hardware - they're focusing on
1. They used an old dual-750Mhz Fire 280R when Sun doesn't even have base configs for 280Rs with that CPU anymore. How bout using up-to-date machines?
2. Strangely, they chose to use third-party Gig-E cards rather than Sun's own, quite good Gig-E hardware. This alone could be enough to ruin the validity of the benchmarks. This is probably because they chose to focus on Gig-E over copper, a strange choice in and of itself.
3. The one PC platform box was a dual PIII 1.4Ghz. Not exactly the performance leader in dual CPU PC servers.
4. The benchmarks were all runnning one server app, Xinet's own fullpress.
All these benchmarks show, is that one app, from one developer ran faster on the Apple Xserve than on some selected, out-of-date, hardware from other vendors. To all appearances, Xinit was not doing a platform cometition so much as a random benchmark with hardware that they happened to have one hand. The number of variables that could invalidate the results entirely is just silly.
"Xinet sucks at optimizing it's software for non Apple OS's"
You can't seriously think that the 2-way Xserve is outperforming the 12-way Sun machine because the hardware is superior.
The only thing more ridiculous than this title is the idea that it actually got approved. Something along the lines of "Xserve faster than competitors in skewed benchmark of niche market software".
/. hosted at http://www.apple.com/propaganda .
Maybe you guys can get this portion of
Dual AMD 1U Servers with identical specs to Apple's Xserve can be had sub-$1000 Xserve costs $5000.
This was claimed many times when the Xserve was announced, but interestingly, nobody was able to give a pointer to one.
Apparently these mythical cheap servers don't exist.
Since its rare for a server to have four drive bays, etc, and a new style 1U enclosure was created by Apple, I'm pretty confident htat you are simply telling a lie here.
If you weren't you'd have provided an example.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Im home alone and Im sooooooo horny!! Its been weeks since my husband has
deigned to make love to me. I decide that since he will be gone all night that
I will pleasure myself. I light dozens of scented candles and put on my sexiest
white negligee. The one hubby has never seen me in. I dont close the blinds
thinking that it is late and no one is around. I grab my slippery oil and put a
tape in the vcr. The first scene is of a woman with 2 men......one fills her
pussy whilst the other fills her ass.
They are somewhat rough with her and they maul her tits. One of them puts his
hand on her throat and I feel myself getting wet. I pull up the hem of my gown
and spread my legs lightly fingering my clit......I am already very wet and I
slide a finger into my pussy to get some juices to use on my clit. I have my
head thrown back and my eyes are closed so I do not see the figure standing
outside my window watching me pleasure myself. He is all dressed in black save
for the corner of a white cloth peeking out of his back pocket. There is a
small black pouch at his waist and his hand is gently stroking his stiffening
erection through his pants. He watches me as my head comes up and my eyes open.
In the flickering light of the candles and the TV screen, he sees my eyes have
gone emerald green with the pleasure I am giving myself. My finger flicks my
stiffening clit and my hips buck uncontrollably. One hand toys with my nipples
through the sheer fabric of the gown. I pinch them lightly and they harden
under my fingers. I return this hand to between my legs and slide 2 fingers
into my sopping pussy. He can hear the soft, wet smacking noises they make as I
fuck myself with my hand. He can bear no more........he has to have me NOW!
Consequences be damned! He glides around to the side door and finds it
unlocked. Her husband always locks the doors, but she scoffs at him for this
habit.
He smiles as his gloved hand pushes the door shut behind him. He locks it. He
soundlessly treads the hallway to the living room. My soft moans guiding him to
me.
I have thrown my head back and closed my eyes again. PERFECT! He retrieves the
small square of cloth and pours a small amount of clear liquid on it from the
bottle in the pouch at his waist. My breath is coming hard and fast now and my
moans have turned into small mews of pleasure. He has named her "Kitten" for
this very reason.
She has teased him many times before.....leaving the blinds open while she
changed, bathed or walked nude through her home. Now she will be his and his
alone. His approach is soundless and he is never sure what makes her open
her eyes. When she does, they are glazed with lust.......she is ready to
orgasam.....
Im on the ragged edge of a huge orgasam when I open my eyes and see a
man standing behind me. He's holding a white cloth and in a swift movement, he
cups it over my mouth and nose and presses my head firmly back into the
cushions of the couch.My hands, still wet and slick with my juices fly to his
hand and try to pry it from my face. He is too strong!! I cant budge him!! My
eyes shade into blue, and open still wider in fear. He smiles at this. The
cloth smells funny and I try not to breathe in but he reaches over my shoulder
with his other hand and presses firmly down on my clit with his leather-gloved
finger. My climax was on me in a rush and I breathed deeply. The first rush of
the drug took me. He removed his hand from my pussy and pinned one of my wrists
to the couch. The one hand that remained free had hardly any strength in it
suddenly. I was weak as a kitten. My eyes darted around the room looking for
some way to escape, some one to help me. He must have noticed this because he
chuckled and said,
"No my pretty little kitten, there is no way out for you.....no one is coming
to rescue you, no one can help you now. Sleep kitten, sleep. When you wake up,
you'll be in your new home." Then he laughed. I tried to beg and plead with my
eyes for release. I Locked my eyes onto his and I heard him suck in a breath.
"Close those big blue eyes, time to sleep.............." and indeed I could
feel them glazing over ans my hands dropped into my lap and the strength
drained from my body. The last thing I heard was the woman on the tape moaning
out her orgasam,,,,,and the last thing I saw as my eyes rolled back in my head
were his eyes, brown as a doe's.
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.
...also dedicated to how much CLIT sucks ass!
AC's 4 eva'!
I too love Apple, buit this stuff hurts their credibility.
What everyone seems to have missed is that this is a *single drive* benchmark. One or even two spindles is just way too few, the machine will be COMPLETELY disk-I/O bound - the number of CPUs therefore make no difference whatsoever. All systems will perform badly with this configuration. The differences you are seeing in this test are related to file system differences and perhaps some caching differences. Both of these are negligible parts of the total workload when you're dealing with large, sequentially accessed files (such as in photoshop) in a properly configured system.
My personal experience with the SGI box in the benchmark showed me that it can fully saturate multiple Gigabit Ethernet cards as well as multiple fiber channel cards simultaneously. It is an I/O monster, but I was using a big RAID array with data striped accross many drives to improve bandwidth.
I'd really like to see what the Xserve can do when not artificially constrained like this.
people, I just feal the need to point out one thing,
IT'S A GOD DAMMED MOTHER FUCKING BENTCHMARK!!!!!!
That means its like politics, unless its something good for the side your on it doesn't mean anything.
as far as I can tell this bentchmark says that a Mac is good at Photoshop.
what a shock. get over it. move on.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
This wasn't a test of all-around server tastiness, but of the area Xinet is most interested in- publishing. That means pulling files down local with Photoshop, collecting for a print job (whether QuarkXPress or InDesign), opening the darn EPS file straight from The Server because the Boss doesn't want you saving it on the local drive, and so on. It's the client that needs the AltiVec optimisation; the server just needs to "shovel" the files here and there.
Xinet needs to know where its software will be best used, so that they can plan accordingly. Other 'benchmarks' aren't interesting to them.
Y'see, until now, WinNT box sellers were trying to muscle into the publishing server market, extolling their rack-mountability and cross-platform compatability, and Linux box manufacturers weren't that far behind. You could say that Apple's xServe is going to win back those shops first, then go for the mixed-OS networks, securing the flanks before launching the main offensive into Serverland...
You call these benchmarks? Who cares about file sharing & serving? And batch print jobs? Why can't these guys get on the planet & use the industry standard?!
Quake 3 frame rates!
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
Here's a similarly configured Penguin Computing Linux server.
In case that quote link dies:
Standard Features
Selected Features
Price: $2,124
Compared to the "Fastest" Xserve configuration ($3999 with default options), it's only got a 40GB drive, a single Gigabit Ethernet interface (with two integrated 10/100 nics), and no FireWire. Neither system has a support plan other than the free warranty coverage.
Not "sub-$1000", but not too bad.
Of course, the Penguin system runs Red Hat Linux 7.3, which isn't so hard to use, but it's certainly not "point at the picture and click" like the Xserve appears to be.
There's obviously not as much room for expansion with the Penguin system. (Drive bays, Gigabit card uses the only PCI slot, etc.)
I don't really have an opinion about this; just wanted to provide an example of a "Dual AMD 1U Server with identical[ish] specs."
Apple is notably absent from SPEC's list--they never submitted results.
However, third parties have run the SPEC benchmarks. A 1GHz G4 seems to perform about as well as a 1GHz Pentium III: decent but not overwhelming. See also this Register article.
Apple should move to the G5 quickly. Or, perhaps, Apple should even switch to some 64bit Intel or AMD processor--Motorola is likely going to keep remaining behind the curve a bit.
Includes some benchmark results:
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Good
Wow, that can't be a fair benchmark then, we'd better slow the clock down on the Pentiums and Athlons too, you know, just to make it "fair."
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?
Lies about crimes
Yeah I was joking.
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
It seems to me that if Apple spreads the word about how well their Xserve performs, possibly doing more benchmark tests, they could take control of the small server market. Heck, they might even branch out to larger servers. Its Apple, anything could happen.