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PPC Linux vs. Mac OS X Server: Linux Edges Out

Posted by michael on from the blame-it-on-the-gui dept.

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."

5 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. It's a good thing (and not just because Linux won) by GreatDave · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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$.

    Now let's see OS X Server kill, er, compared to Windows 2000/.NET... Run, Bill, run! :P

    --
    "I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
  2. Re:Advantages??? by WatertonMan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It depends upon what you are comparing it to. According to most benchmarks I've seen when compared to the equivalent offerings from Dell it ends up being cheaper and faster.

    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.

  3. Re:Still wondering... by Computer! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Try typing instructions into the steering wheel of your car, and see how well that works out. Maybe you could get a printed list of items inside your fridge, and after executing other commands to find out the expiration date, and how much of the item was left, you could type the name of the item, and it would appear. OR, you could just reach in and grab the milk and smell it. LIFE HAS A GUI FOR A REASON.

    --
    If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
  4. 10% is not a big difference, even for a large site by Jim+McCoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. A good test of MacOS, but not a real benchmark by Rui+del-Negro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    ~~~