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PPC Linux vs. Mac OS X Server: Linux Edges Out
Spencerian writes "Mac OS X is a very promising new BSD variant, but how does it rate as a server? Byte.com writer Moshe Bar has made an extensively balanced performance comparison of Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 versus SuSE Linux PPC with the 2.4.19 kernel. Both operating systems ran on the same hardware: an Xserve 1U rack mount server from Apple. While /.ers may guess (correctly) at his results, Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 wasn't as far behind the curve as you might think. Performance might've been better if Moshe had Mac OS X Server 10.2, with its faster GUI and other enhancements, but still, it appears that Mac OS X Server 10.1 was doing pretty good for a 1-year old."
to compare, say FreeBSD vs. OS X?
This goes to show that Mac OS X Server does compare very well to other Unices (okay, Unix-LIKE systems) in terms of performance. With its preeeety GUI anemeties, OS X Server could be just the stepping stone we need to get more admins to switch over from M$.
:P
Now let's see OS X Server kill, er, compared to Windows 2000/.NET... Run, Bill, run!
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
Why do you need a GUI on the server anyways? All it does is waste cycles.
Just cut-n-paste the URL into a new browser window. They're denying any referer that matches slashdot.org (see my previous comment)
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Posix bases are better in general for server applications than windows. Windows is designed for users. Posix is geared towards computers. Windows is about making things easy. Posix is about making things work well. Each of these has concessions towards the other's area of expertise, but it's all a matter of which is better for the job, and if the concessions are better than the other's native functions. Damn...think i confused myself with that
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Because "paper MCSEs" are trained to admin with a mouse, and need to be shown the light.
OS X can be a stepping stone either to Darwin alone, BSD in general, or Unix in general (NB: That includes Linux.)
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
Why did Apple choose to go out and start a new kernel project when they could have just based OS X on the Linux kernel instead? They could have gained so much ground and lost so little. It's worked for so many other companies--why not Apple?
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
actually, the xserve is very reasonable priced for the hardware. competes well with intel hardware, so even if you re not using OSX, it s still a very nice option.
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also, some people think the IA32 architecture is a bit braindead.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/
This story was originally posted on MacSlash, with a thread of opinions on this as well.
Biggest optimizations he missed: turning off Aqua! I kind of have to take this whole test with a grain of salt, you're not really doing justice to a spec test when you have two gui's running taking away performance from what your trying to test: the server.
Since for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to shut down the GUI environment of OS X, I configured a simple VGA X server for Linux and started KDE, just to have a fair basis for comparison.
Come on Moche, do a little research and login as "> console".
"I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away." --Jack Handy
The following pdf-file probably needs some clarifications from someone else than me. MacOS X beats RedHat over and over.
Maybe to you a 10% performance difference is not much, but for large sites, performance is often the deciding factor. The faster you can serve your customers, the happier they'll be.
Xinet Benchmark
I admit I'm a tad skeptical of the relevance of this benchmark, but it does seem that Apple has a nice system. I suspect you could roll your own better with OpenBSD or Linux and a nice AMD multiprocessor system. That's just me though. And realistically a lot of businesses DON'T want such systems. They want a "come as it is" system. Further a lot of people don't want all the messing around that you have to do with most Linux of BSD distributions. Apple has put a very nice interface on their server. Yet you have the added benefit of being able to drop to Unix when necessary.
Apple's big problem is still the chipset used with the G4's. Given that, despite many of the nice features, unless you are primarily serving other Macs, I don't think XServe is a good choice. If you have people with Unix backgrounds then I think FreeBSD or OpenBSD is better. And for many ASP systems Sun is the clear winner. However keep watch on Apple if IBM manages to restore hardware parity for Apple. I think that as a server OSX will mature quickly.
People buy OS X for different reasons than they do Linux. The fact that OS X has comparable performance is great news for the Mac platform.
I love OS X for my desktop. I don't think I'd use it on a server because I can build a cheaper server using Linux to do everything OS X does and better. But from a desktop standpoint I find the GUI and applications a more pleasant experience than what's available for Linux.
So the fact that I can run Apache, PERL, PHP, MySQL, GNU tools, BSD userland, AND Office X, Photoshop, RTCW, Jedi Knight etc on the same laptop makes me very happy. And it beats the hell out of dual-booting.
So this is great for OS X. And great for Linux too I guess. Yay, everyone wins!
OS X FS (HFS+) is not journaled. OTH, which FS in Linux? Ext3 is journaled and not very good for large directories without htree patch. ReiserFS is really fast for small files and creating new files. XFS very fast for large files...
That's to say, the filesystem is possibly the bottleneck for those database and sandmail test. And don't forget the huge amount of apache log lines generated during the benchmarks.
OTH, why did he disable fsync in sendmail? Any doubt in filesystem/cache performance on OS X?
And.. for god sake, he didn't found how to disable the Aqua environment? And the console login whithout a password, what? One of my student found it in couple of seconds in Google.
Cony!
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
In those cases the ease of management will likely be a bigger factor than overall speed. If overall speed is that important you really need someone who is an expert in Linux or BSD, knows how to eck out every bit of speed, knows security up the yazoo, etc. And of course your department will have to pay for this guy. And that ends up being near $100,000 a year once you start including benefits etc. (Or more if you have several folks)
For a more regular IT staff who doesn't want to spend that much time or effort XServe, like the equivalent offerings from DELL, Sun or Compact, is a nice server. As I said for ASP I still think Sun might be a better choice. But it really depends upon what you are doing.
A 10% performance difference is a wash as far as most sites are concerned, for a large site you will see this sort of a difference eaten up in your hourly traffic variance (e.g. you spec for the peak load, not sustained load) and if your bottleneck is at your servers then you have other problems to deal with. I can max out a reasonably sized internet uplink with a single, off-the-shelf PC. Given the cost of these boxes, it is _always_ going to be the case that your monthly bandwidth bill exceeds the cost of the servers needed to max out that connection. Think about that one for a few minutes and then get back to me on why you think a 10% performance difference is going to be a significant factor when it comes to purchasing decisions...
When I was running YahooMail ops we used massive farms of FreeBSD boxes, not because it was the absolute best server PC OS when it came to performance (although at the time I think that it probably was) but because it was what we knew best. Filo was a BSD hacker and we had a collection of ops guys who knew that particular OS inside and out -- if there was a problem we could track it down and figure things out, we didn't have to start guessing or need to make an appeal to newsgroups or mailing lists for help. For a large site performance numbers like these are one factor, but it is not the only factor and is often not even the most important factor. Maintenance and management can often be a more important cost factor then raw performance, sometimes it is something as "trivial" as driver support (or even raw performance differences among various drivers and OS configuration options) or what the team doing the technical evaluation feels comfortable with using and supporting.
it appears that Mac OS X Server 10.1 was doing pretty good for a 1-year old.
/.
Oh, you're so merciful when it comes to Apple. I'd never expect this kind of sympathy for Intel or MS on
Netbsd and Openbsd are the only bsd distro's that are stable and out of alpha for the powerpc platform. Last time I looked at the powerpc freebsd project, the big news was that perl compilied! Obviously its very alpha and would do injustice to freebsd because the optimizations are not there and that is assuming FreeBSD would be mature enough to run these tests. Can mysql even compile on it yet?
Also it has been said here before and I will say it again that the kernel in MacOSX is not Freebsd based!
Its based on Mach and Nextstep! Only some of the libraries and a few programs have been ported. All the i/o code is based on Mach and not FreeBSD. Its the i/o code that needs some work.
Also I expect a micro-kernel vs a macro-kernel flamewar to show up on this thread to explain why this is. Since both FreeBSD and Linux are macrokernel based, all of the i/o code runs in the kernel. On MacOSX most of the i/o runs in userland. They really are apples to oranges.
http://saveie6.com/
This is a good test to see how efficient MacOS is. And personally, I'm a bit surprised that Linux "won"; after all, MacOS was supposedly written by people who know that hardware inside-out, and should be very well optimised for it.
But this is not much of "MacOS vs. Linux" server benchmark, because Linux can run much faster on other plaforms. Why should you buy an Xserve to run Linux when you can get Intel / AMD / Transmeta systems that are faster and / or cheaper? The main (only?) reason to buy Apple hardware is the operating system. Which, judging from these reults, definitely has room for improvement.
RMN
~~~
This is pretty much acknowledged by everyone on the list. There are a couple of issues, not the least is that there is only one color scheme that works well, the others are very very slow.
Second seems to be an alignment issue in how java (and the underlying gcc math libs) are compiled. Doubles are misaligned which is a big hit on PPC platforms.
According to the Java Developer's list for Apple, these issues were basically unfixable with the existing 1.3.1 due to time constraints and underlying Sun code. I'd expect the eventual release of 1.4.1 to be much faster.