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No More Apple Mysteries Part Two
UltimaGuy writes "Anadtech has an article up comparing the IBM G5 with Intel's CPU. This gives us insight on the strength and weakness of Mac OS X. It also has some thoughts of what they perceive to be OS X's Achilles Heel." From the article: "That is what we'll be doing in this article: we will shed more light on the whole Apple versus x86 PC, IBM G5 versus Intel CPU discussion by showing you what the G5 is capable of when running Linux. This gives us insight on the strength and weakness of Mac OS X, as we compare Linux and Mac OS X on the same machine. The article won't answer all the questions that the first one had unintentionally created. As we told you in the previous article, Apple pointed out that Oracle and Sybase should fare better than MySQL on the Xserve platform. We will postpone the more in-depth database testing (including Oracle) to a later point in time, when we can test the new Apple Intel platform." This is the sequel to another article, reported on in June.
It's not a bug.
It's just that unlike pretty much everything else out there Apple GUARENTEE that fsync won't return until the drive has actually written the data to disk, not just to its cache. To do this they require specific drive firmware from their vendors. In their docs they point out exactly how to stop this, it's just that mysql obviously made the decision that data integrity is more valuable then speed.
(Oh, and OS X's task switcher sucks)
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
It's not a bug.
:-/
I was referring to the bug in MySQL, not the Mac. The Mac's behavior is correct. That's why PostgreSQL works fine. MySQL relied on Linux-specific behavior, and got burned.
In their docs they point out exactly how to stop this, it's just that mysql obviously made the decision that data integrity is more valuable then speed.
Just be glad that we get secure data out of MySQL at all. Last time I tried to install MySQL on my Mac, there were big warning signs all over the place saying, "The Mac is buggy, your data is not safe! Run away, run away!" Of course, then an Apple guy stepped up and pointed out the fact that fsync worked exactly as it should, and that MySQL needed to fix their code. They've changed the code for better data security, but AFAIK they still haven't optimized for "correct" data integrity behavior.
Oh, and OS X's task switcher sucks
Amen. Drives me nuts, too, because the FreeBSD switcher really wasn't that bad. Here's hoping that Apple gets that fixed one of these days.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Blah blah blah, benchmarks are nice, but here's the real scoop:
I have a dual 2ghz PowerMac G5, a 3.4ghz Dell Opitplex and a 3.6ghz Developer Transition Kit. I use my G5 as my main computer at home and my Dell and DTK as my main machine at work.
The DTK smokes my dual 2ghz badly, and runs PPC apps in Rosetta at seemingly only slightly slower speeds than my G5. Graphics functions on the DTK smoke my dual G5 with the high-end (at the time) NVidia card it came with. Apps load much faster, Safari is much faster, everything I use is much faster.
The DTK's UI responsiveness is quicker than my Dell 3.4ghz running Win2003 with all hardware accel turned on. OS X has always been more sluggish for me than Windows, but I had to chuckle when I logged into my Dell after using the DTK for a week exclusively and noticing the Dell UI responsiveness slightly lagging.
It's also important to note that the NeXT ABI is probably much more suited to x86 than PPC.
This is a great thing for Apple, and their Intel-based machines are going to impress and wow people.