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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?
And "was doing pretty good" is written pretty well for a ten-year-old.
'You have requested data that the server has decided not to provide to you. Your request was understood and denied.'
Wow, a self-aware server that _understands_ the Slashdot effect. I wonder if it is part of their mythology.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
Mac OS X adds both local and remote GUI admin tools, which are quite good.
Donate free food here
What was the swap confirguration in linux during the test? I believe it was a SWAP partition rather than a SWAP file.
Whereas on OS X it should have been default(ed) to a SWAP file.
The difference in performance is quite considerable because for a SWAP partition the OS doesn't have to go through a lot of IO file system code.
because the server adds some very nice remote configuration and management tools. and dammit, i like pretty.
To me, the performance of Linux over OS-X is marginal and not really worth considering. The choice really is over what the computer administrator is more comfortable with - hell, put NetBSD if it will make the administrator more productive. The server only costs $3000 bucks so screwing around just to get a 10% improvemnt is not worth it - but if Linux makes the administrator 10% more productive then do it.
Stupid Example:
I haven't benchmarked FreeBSD vs Linux and I really don't care - all my file servers are FreeBSD because I'm expensive and learning Linux is not cost effective (for me). YMMV.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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!
Uh, the XServe comes with OS X. You can buy a larger license if you need it, though.
Look, ma! I'm a karma whore
a) Get the latest Jaguar
b) Go to Apple and SuSE and get advice on tuning
c) If it is available under SuSE, use gcc 3.1 for compiling
Moshe admitted that there was probably alot of optimizations that he missed. I'd like to see them both tuned for speed and then compare them.
(Sorry for some stray formatting of the tables; hopefully you can guess where the columns were)
e solve
Comparing Apples and Penguins
By Moshe Bar
Last month, I described my romance with Mac OS X as a near-perfect environment for the desktop, and/or laptop. The harmonious combination of Apple GUI know-how with Unix (FreeBSD) for stability, security and efficiency are too sweet for geeks from all walks of life. I continue to use Apple laptops (I now have both the iBook and the Apple G4) for my writing, teaching and speaking activity. We received tons of reader's email here at Byte.com in response to that column. Too many to be named here rightly corrected me: Contrary to my first impression, there is indeed a package manager for OS X. It's called Fink and you can find it on www.sf.net/projects/fink. It also turned out that the Jaguar version I had received was a pre-release CD which contained only the 2.95 gcc compiler, though many reported that the 3.1 version of the same compiler was installed by default, as well. Apple quickly reacted by sending me the released version of Jaguar and, in fact, both compilers are present.
As good as Mac OS X is for desktops and laptops, one wonders if the FreeBSD inside is not too restricted by the Apple jacket around it to also make for an efficient, secure and fast server OS. Apple is now busy convincing the world that Apples make also for excellent server appliances in the handy U1 format, thanks to OS X. That new product is called Apple Xserve. Many potential buyers are, however, asking themselves if OS X--given its recent introduction--is ready today to handle their critical apps.
That's why I decided to take one of these sleek Xserve boxes and test run it both under OS X and under Linux. I was loaned an Xserve for a week by a geek friend of mine over at a very large ISP. That machine came with Dual 1Ghz PowerPC G4 and 1 GB of Ram. I installed OS X from scratch on it using the CDs that come along with the product. The resulting OS after the install has version 10.1.5. The included AGP 4X card with 64 MB of dedicated graphics RAM is a screamer. The dual CPUs in the system push out an impressive 15Gflops floating point power. Alas, apart from High Performance Clustering applications, relatively few people are going to take full advantage of it. The integer and memory bandwidth performance, however, is at least up to par with the latest IA32-based U1 servers out there. Obviously, I was not going to make use of the graphics card. I didn't bother trying to configure it under Linux because, after all, I tested this machine for server performance.
I used the SuSE PowerPC Linux distribution for the second part of the test under Linux. Linux installed effortlessly and was happy to use all of the hardware found in the Xserve.
The Test Environment
Next to the obvious Apple Xserve, I set up 4 clients on the same 100mbit network, switched by the excellent Linksys 24port 1000/100/10 switch that powers most of my network in my home lab (for the LinkSys EF24G2M-10/100 EtherFast Dual Gigabit Switch 2-port 1000BaseTX see www.linksys.com).
The 4 clients are all IBM Netfinity 5100 or 3000 machines running Linux 2.4.19 with my openMosix clustering extensions to automatically load-balance the requests thrown at the Xserve server. The four machines can easily saturate a fast server on a good switched network.
Next, I set up exactly the same server environment both under Mac OS X and under Linux with the 2.4.19 kernel. I always made sure to use the same version of the server software both under OS X and Linux, each time re-compiling the binaries from source locally with the 2.95 gcc compiler, which is available on both platforms. The compiler itself was also locally re-compiled, taking all reasonable optimizations into consideration.
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.
I ran tests against networking (Sendmail and MySQL tests), process build-up and tear-down (the cgi tests) and against the VMs (all tests combined, under memory shortage).
For the static html benchmark, I wrote a simple html page just displaying "hello, world." For the dynamic pages, I wrote the CGI handler in Perl. The Perl used was 5.8.0 for both environments. Here is the sample cgi handler:
package Apache::Bench;
sub handler {
my($r) = shift;
$r->content_type('text/html');
$r->send_http_header();
$r->print('Hello, world ');
200;
}
For the MySQL part, I set up a MySQL database with 30 million addresses generated by a simple filler Perl script before the benchmark. Then, I repeatedly let the clients run a series of transactions against it. I downloaded MySQL 3.23.52, skipping the harder-to-compile 4.0.x series, recompiled it locally under both OSes, then configured it with the following parameters:
[mysqld]
big-tables
skip-locking
skip-name-r
skip-networking
set-variable = max_allowed_packet=1M
set-variable = thread_stack=128K
set-variable = back_log=256
set-variable = key_buffer=30M
set-variable = table_cache=64
set-variable = sort_buffer=5M
set-variable = record_buffer=5M
set-variable = max_connections=4000
set-variable = join_buffer=5M
skip-thread-priority
For the mail handler, finally, all involved clients in the LAN were sending MIME-encoded attachments (I chose a small size of 8.5 KB to stress the MTA more than the network) to a 4.9 KB message. Sendmail was the standard 8.12.6 version available from the sendmail.org site, rebuilt for each OS. No special tuning was done and no anti-spamming measures were enabled. There was just one mail queue under both OS X and Linux, and the Sendmail-typical load-adaptive throttles were disabled to make use of the full bandwidth and system power. There is an excellent howto on enabling the native Sendmail 8.12.2 of OS X 10.1.5 here. I did however, as mentioned previously, compile my own Sendmail 8.12.6.
Needless to say, setting up the server environment was considerably easier and faster. Linux, with all required sub servers, was ready in about 3 hours of work, whereas a long day passed before I had my OS X ready to go.
For the web server tests, I downloaded Apache 2.0.39 and recompiled locally with the proper libraries. Just to avoid unnecessary lstat() system calls, I turned on FollowSymLinks and turned off SymLinksIfOwnerMatch. The SendBufferSize was increased to the size of the static page I used for this test. To make sure the page size is bigger than a TCP packet and also bigger than a virtual memory page, I made it 4050 bytes. Both OS X and Linux use 4 KB VM page sizes.
I ran the following Perl program on the four clients each getting a different file, while I placed the virtual memory of the server under stress to cause the cache contents to be deleted as much as possible. Here is the Perl stress test program:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$counter = 0;
$seconds = 2;
$html = " ";
$args = ("wget", "http://192.168.1.1/index1.html");
$time1 = time;
$check = $time1+$seconds;
print "strtd at", time, "\n";
while (time != $check) {
$html = system(@args) or die "wget failed hard with $?";
$counter = $counter +1;
}
$time2 = time;
print "ended at", $time2, "\n";
print "for ", $seconds, " seconds. \n\n";
print "got ", $counter, " pages from server \n";
[root@moshe1 temp]#
In the end, I was quite pleased with the set-up. Again, all this is far easier and faster to do under Linux than under Mac OS X, but it can be done on both platforms given enough time.
The Results
Since this is not a scientific benchmark, I am quite sure your results will wary from mine. Also, note that this benchmark was done without prior consultations with either Apple or SuSE, so surely there are tons of tuning parameters for both operating systems that I simply didn't know about. Also, one should consider that the FreeBSD used in OS X is quite an old version (version 3.2, while FreeBSD just released 4.7), and that the Linux kernel has experienced a fantastic growth in performance over the last year, especially in the VM area.
The results should therefore be understood as a general indication of the behavior of a particular OS when checked against the other, and not as a quality rating. All tests were run 10 times and I then averaged the results.
Having said that, let's look the Apache results:
URL OS X 10.1.5 Linux 2.4.19
http://server/index.html 6127.2 reqs/second 7283.7 reqs/second
http://server/cgi-bin/perl.cgi 624.1 reqs/second 703.5 reqs/second
From these results one can assume the VM and network stack of Linux to be superior to OS X. It could also be that the page reclaiming algorithm is simply smarter in Linux than in OS X.
For MySQL, I did much the same thing, with a Perl script running heavy SQL statements against the database. Here are the results:
OS X Execution Times Operation Seconds
alter_table_add 212
alter_table_drop 118
connect 2
count 39
count_on_key 721
create+drop 4
create_index 31
insert 12
order_by 187
order_by_key 65
select_distinct 38
update_with_key 119
Totals 1648
Linux Execution Times
Operation Seconds
alter_table_add 197
alter_table_drop 108
connect 2
count 15
count_on_key 607
create+drop 6
create_index 22
insert 8
order_by 89
order_by_key 91
select_distinct 32
update_with_key 76
Totals 1253
These results really surprised me. It seems OS X has a poor I/O subsystem as compared to the Linux subsystem.
For the Sendmail results it is important to state that Procmail was unused on both systems. In order to let Sendmail wait less for I/Os, I also deleted the fsync() system call, which forces the full writing of each message on the file system. By deleting that system call from the sources, I let Sendmail defer the actual writing of the inode of each message to a later point in time. This is, obviously, against the RFC and should not be done in production-grade MTAs. Once you eliminate the fsync() call, more RAM will nicely scale up the number of emails being handled, which in turn better reflects the performance of I/O caching in the OS.
OS X Linux
Incoming Emails 816 mails/second 941 mails/second
Mail Relaying 581 mails/second 609 mails/second
Here again, Linux seems clearly superior to OS X for all VM-intensive operations.
To go that extra mile, I then ran all these tests combined. Obviously all values were much lower and it is not the issue here to actually measure them. What, however, was much more interesting were values like load level, interrupts handled per seconds and context switches per second. For this final benchmark, I ran the Apache/MySQL/Sendmail tests at the same time, waited about 20 minutes after starting, recorded the results over a 2 hour period, and finally calculated the average:
OS X Linux
Average User-Land Runnable Processes 263 272
Average Idle Percentage 0.3% 1.1%
Average Context Switches (per second) NA 10212
Average Free Pages NA 890
Average Interrupts (per second) NA 9281
Average Blocks Out (per second) NA 2008
Average Load Level 27.1 26.2
Average Swapped Set Size 421 MB 102 MB
Sadly, I couldn't find any way to get decent system information from OS X. Things like interrupts or context switches per seconds are important indicators for a sysadmin. If there is no easy access to them (I am sure the kernel itself maintains these counters) how is the sysadmin supposed to see if the server is under- or over-utilized? This is a real shortcoming and Apple better introduce some way to monitor the system if they are serious about being in the server market.
Conclusions
Well, for a newcomer to the Unix market, I am actually surprised at the very decent results and stability of OS X. I experienced no crashes under both operating systems, which comes as no surprise to Linux users. For Mac users, however, this is by itself already a big improvement over previous operating systems for the Apple. The fact that OS X needs to improve in VM and I/O handling is understandable given its relatively young age. After all, Linux has had more than ten years to get where it is today, and even that is not much by OS standards.
The Xserve's floating point performance is superior to many other solutions out there, and that alone makes it an excellent choice for clustering environments. But if all you are looking for is a server for your standard Internet or Intranet applications, then I see a problem in justifying the high price tag of the Xserve ($4000 for the configuration used in this test) for something that you can do faster, easier and cheaper on one of the many different products in the IA32 space.
Moshe Bar is a systems administrator and OS researcher who started learning UNIX on a PDP-11 with AT&T UNIX Release 6, back in 1981. Moshe has a M.Sc and a Ph.D. in computer science and writes UNIX-related books.
For more of Moshe's columns, visit the Serving With Linux Index Page.
Copyright © 2002 CMP Media LLC, Privacy Policy
Site comments: webmaster@byte.com
Maybe it means the opposite of "was doing pretty evil". Presumably describing a Windows/IIS server configuration.
Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server beat a Red Hat Linux* server in bandwidth tests, showing its clear superiority.
* Red Hat Linux v4.2 used in tests.
FreeBSD PPC support is still wearing diapers, see the current status.
2) Moshe is not smart enough to boot Mac OS X into command line, "Since for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to shut down the GUI environment of OS X" -- Moshe "I can't use Google" Bar. Here's a tip Moshi, when the log on screen pops up, type ">console" in the user line.
3) MacSlash has already dealt with this.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Nah, that's not it. I got that same message but I use a web proxy that forges referring URLs. It does break some web pages in funny ways, but I find the idea of littering server logs with references to fuckedcompany.com quite amusing. How's -that- for geek humor?
....you should check out their comments.
You say
Well, the xserves are a very sweet package for the price. Fast, low power, low heat, small, good looking(for clients) and very reliable. I havn't done the full cost-benifit analysis, but I think they would come out well against many cheaper Intel based solutions.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Agreed... but let me throw you a curve.
POSIX systems have extensibility, portability, multiple programming languages, a networked windowing system with your choice of WM/DE, TRUE multiuser capability, efficiency and stability.
What does Windows have? Most of the above, specifically minus portability, the networked windows system (Terminal Services doesn't cut the cheese), efficiency (in recent versions) and stability. What Windows doesn't give you is choice. I argue Windows is not any more "designed for the user" than Unix, but rather that in Windows (or at least in each version) everything is only One Microsoft Way, and you cannot do much to change that. Microsoft also has mindshare and a $50+ stock price.
To the topic at hand now. Apple now more or less equals Unix as far as the OS is concerned. Specifically, OS X is POSIX plus everything being pretty, and there being an Apple Way (often, multiple Apple ways such as the choice of APIs) and a BSD Way to do most things.
This is why I argue OS X, now that it is proving itself as a server, can advance ground on the desktop and on the server.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
These results, should they turn out to be reliable (which I believe that they are), speak volumes about the quality of MAC OS X. It is just slightly less efficient then Linux, yet still retaining a very high "ease of use factor". Not to mention it's amazing progess with the various components of it's GUI (Quartz - which creates two dimensional images, ATS, terrific OpenGL, the ability to save anything as a PDF, Aqua....) and easy to implement Cocoa and Carbon APIs.
d) Try the tests while logged into the Mac in console mode, by typing
at the system login screen.As others have noted, a dormant window manager shouldn't consume any processor time, but if you can disable it on both machines that's a more accurate comparison than trying to get an X11/KDE combination to perform similarly to Aqua. That itself would be a long, complex, and ultimately probably not very interesting comparison to run -- suffice to say that if you can make both window servers fall out of the picture the comparison should be more accurate.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
The BSD development process is slow and steady. It doesn't have 4 different threading models in the tree. It puts stability above new features. All good things for Apple.
It would have been nice though.....
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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!
... for a Mac. When it goes up to double performance, I'll consider it. For now, it is just so many pretty colors when running in as a server. In my personal opinion, that goes for the desktop too. But I'm sure many disagree, because "OS X has feature X!" Fine with me.
Our friends at Macslash have an article about Apple recently jumping to the #5 server vendor, behind Sun Microsystems.
In another MacSlash article, Why use Linux? there is quite a lot of discussion about the merits of both Linux and Mac OS X.
Both make rather interesting reading!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
A more legitimate comparison would be a $4000 Xserve running OS X vs. $4000 worth of Linux on x86 hardware.
But, we know what the results of that would be.
POSIX is all about portability. The day I can take a Unix program and recompile it on Windows without the use of an intermediary API or environment (Cygwin, MS-SFU) is the day Windows is truly POSIX compliant.
FTR, for drivers, Windows provides some POSIX support. This is why your hosts file is in a directory called etc in system32\drivers, for example. But Windows breaks POSIX in many other smaller ways. I'd really question how MS got that certification for Win2k.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
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
Gartner has a report of the Worldwide server market for the 3Q 2002 (which grew by 3.1%). Though Apple makes up 1.2% of the server market, their sales of servers increased 273.8% (they were 0.4% 3Q 2001). Seems the XServe is making a positive impression.
I ran the Scimark 2.0 Java benchmarks on the same machine, running Yellow Dog Linux, kernel 2.4.19, versus Mac OS 10.2.
Here are my results
Yellow Dog 2.3: SciMark 2.0a
Composite Score: 139.92947174097748
FFT (1024): 123.98639890992068
SOR (100x100): 166.2888365390105
Monte Carlo : 11.87347214947242
Sparse matmult (N=1000, nz=5000): 119.76608441786847
LU (100x100): 277.7325666886154
java.vendor: IBM Corporation
java.version: 1.3.1
os.arch: ppc
os.name: Linux
os.version: 2.4.20-0.7bsmp
MacOS 10.2: SciMark 2.0a
Composite Score: 65.55278911110278
FFT (1024): 45.766180267285044
SOR (100x100): 148.7766358092264
Monte Carlo : 8.128496082717385
Sparse matmult (N=1000, nz=5000): 43.78407287809933
LU (100x100): 81.30856051818576
java.vendor: Apple Computer, Inc.
java.version: 1.3.1
os.arch: ppc
os.name: Mac OS X
os.version: 10.2
Machine:
processor : 0
cpu : 7455, altivec supported
clock : 999MHz
revision : 2.1 (pvr 8001 0201)
processor : 1
cpu : 7455, altivec supported
clock : 999MHz
revision : 2.1 (pvr 8001 0201)
bogomips : 999.42
total bogomips : 1998.84
machine : PowerMac3,6
motherboard : PowerMac3,6 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh
detected as : 129 (PowerMac G4 Windtunnel)
pmac flags : 00000000
L2 cache : 256K unified
memory : 256MB
pmac-generation : NewWorld
Mem: 253776
You can buy a larger license if you need it, though.
There's a larger license than unlimited?
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
Mach has been around years longer than Linux. Mach existed before this event, but in Oct. 1988 the first NeXT cube running NeXTSTEP on a 68030 was released. Every version of NeXTSTEP ran on Mach.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Three words. Apple Remote Desktop.
This is as relevant as the MIPS rating of a CPU (null, to be explicit). I'd really suggest them to take a look at some hardware reviews from gaming sites (e.g. firingsquad) to learn some benchmarking methodology.
And yes, pipes are much faster on Linux than on Windoze. Is it a relevant performance measurement ?
The Raven
The Raven
Actually, there is quite a bit you can do, since most of the actual web stuff is in the BSD layer. 10.1 is based on an older kernel, and 10.2 adds a lot to it. I'm not sure if all the additions really make it faster, but honestly, I don't know.
Type this on a macOS X box:
sysctl -a
Some of these settings are sub-optimal for a server (at least with Jaguar, not necessarily OS X server). You could do something like this:
sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=2097152
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
to increase your TCP buffers, for instance. I know there are more areas for performance tuning, but I don't know them well. Search for sysctl on the web and you're bound to find some.
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?
Because NeXTStep was BSD-on-mach, and MacOS X on Xserve is essentially the next (forgive the pun) iteration of the NeXT Cube. (I am posting this from OmniWeb 2.0 running on NeXTStep 3.3 on an original Color Turbo).
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.
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/
The Darwin kernel is based on Mach. While not a performance demon, Mach offers some very interesting advantages for Apple. Primarily, they have full rights to the code and can relicense it, whereas Linux would have bound them by the GPL. There's some technical advantages too, though.
First of all, Mach was/is developed by Avi Tevanian. Avi is a old buddy of Steve Jobs and they've been working together since the NeXT days. Any questions about architecture? Ask the guy that wrote it, he's just down the hall.
Secondly, the micro-kernelish nature of Mach makes Darwin (and OS X) a highly portable platform. With Motorola on the ropes, being able to shift platforms quickly is far more important than raw kernel speed. Darwin gives Apple hardware options, and options are a very good thing for Apple to have right now.
Lastly, there's momentum. AFAIK, their kernel crew came over from NeXT, where they'd been using Mach since the eighties. Why bother learning the ins and outs of a new architecture, when you've already got something that works? Better to extend what you've already got.
Darwin offers a pretty solid foundation for Apple. Moving to Linux would have taken a large effort for questionable gains.
This
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
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