Ubuntu 8.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.5 Benchmarks

An anonymous reader writes "As a sequel to their Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? Phoronix now has out an article that compares the performance of Ubuntu 8.10 to Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5. They tested both the x86 and x86_64 spins of Ubuntu and threw at both operating systems a number of graphics, disk, computational, and Java benchmarks, among others. With the Mac Mini used in some of the comparisons, 'Leopard' was faster, while in others it was a tight battle."

Comments

SQLite inserts?

[zoid.com]

What's up with the SQLite inserts? Is EXT3 really that bad? I would be interested in seeing PostgreSQL benchmarks.

Re:SQLite inserts?

[Space cowboy]

I read it as the other way around. Linux, Windows, the Mac, just about everything cheat on fsync(). Posix allows this, and even allows a null implementation. Note that linux implements fsync() as a no-op for some filesystems, and that some versions (I don't know which) of Windows can remove fsync() functionality via a registry setting.

On the Mac, calling fsync() does the same thing as it does on anything else with a working fsync() call - it flushes all the data out to the drive and returns.

What the mac also provides is the F_FULLFSYNC fcntl, which does an fsync() then resets the drive controller to force the in-built RAM caches on the drive to be purged out to the physical disk platters. This is glacially slow, compared to the 'normal' fsync(), but under some circumstance may be worth it.

See here for more info, specifically section 9.2.

Simon

Re:I don't get it really

[zappepcs]

Yeah, I forgot to mention that 8 upgrades cost me nothing but time. One thing that I wish Canonical would do is to set up a donation fund where I could donate say $50 per install and know that all the apps that come with Ubuntu would get a reasonably fair share of that money. Is anyone at Canonical listening?

AS it is now, I have to donate separately to those projects which I feel that I use enough to donate to. Trouble is that some projects which I do use are not readily recognizable as such. The Samba project is one such case. Ubuntu and others more-or-less hide its use from the user so they would be unaware that they are using it. I think this would go a long way toward helping various projects. Even if all Samba got from my $50 was $0.75. That is still a donation. In my case it would be eight times that. Yes, I do contribute to F/OSS projects, EFF, and several other groups who have my best interests at heart... well, our interests coincide.

Another thing that Canonical could do, short of setting up such a fund, is write a small app that lists the apps being used on any installation and allow the user to save the list to disk which would include the designated donation web page for that project. That's not quite as good as a donation fund, but would still help the smaller projects by announcing their use and value.

I like a good value as much as the next guy, and there is something satisfying about paying a very fair price for someone's work when it is valuable to yourself. I just wish it was easier to do.

Java

[Anonymous Coward]

They used Mac OS X's 1.5 version of Java, while OS 10.5.5 does include Java 1.6 (64-bit only). I wonder how things would have changed had they selected this version as the default for Mac OS.

- Mg

Re:Summary

[bill_mcgonigle]

2. The other benchmarks are fairly even with Ubuntu coming out on top more often than OS X (one notable exception is SQLite).

Ah, very interesting. Firefox 3 doesn't work in networked OSX environments because the Mozilla devs don't want to turn on a SQLite feature to make it compatible with AFP for performance reasons. Seems like some testing is in order.

Re:Apple's Moving Aggressively On Performance

[TheRaven64]

Leopard has already improved performance in a lot of areas. In particular, mmap performance no longer sucks. I had an interesting experience where I wrote two back ends for some of my code, one with aio and one with mmap. On FreeBSD they were within 5% of each other. On OS X 10.4, the mmap one was an order of magnitude slower (and aio ran slower on the OS X machine, but that's not a very fair test - the OS X machine had a faster CPU but a slower disk). I extended this pathological case to a simple program which mmap'd a 2GB file and then touched one byte in every page in turn, 200 times. On 10.4, this completely killed the machine until it finished running, and didn't finish when I left it overnight. On 10.5, the machine stayed responsive (some slowdown, but not much), and finished in about an hour. Now that it's certified as fully complying with SUS'03, Darwin is a pretty nice OS, although too many parts of it (audio subsystem, for example) are closed for it to really be useful without OS X.

Re:Apple's Moving Aggressively On Performance

[scorp1us]

So many people are going to call BS on this, but...

I was in the mac store the other day, and I swear I could tell the difference between the new Mac books with the NVIDIA chips and the ones without. From just looking at the scaling performance of the doc as you mouse over it, it looked so much more solid.

I tend to be very sensitive to visual artifacts. I hated my MythTV box because of the tearing (memory bus issue) and blocking on Comcast (so glad I now have FIOS, which still blocks, but only for static or oceanscapes).

Things like a dock where it feels "solid" (better servicing of repaints) just give a better impression of stability and performance, even if its just a simple scale operation. Having no flicker in position or delay in rendering make an impression on people who may not even be aware of what they are seeing.

Re:I don't get it really

[vigour]

I have to commend you on your honesty and generosity. It's people like you that makes a big difference to the overheads of the F/OSS community. Just like every vote counts (as we saw the other day) every donation counts, and people like me who've contributed neither time nor money benefit greatly from it all.

As you said, it would be nice if there was a centralised portal for donating to the various projects that make up a distro like Ubuntu. The biggest problem is deciding where it goes, and how much would go to each group, essentially deciding how valuable (or valued) a particular project is to the F/OSS community at large.
That's a flamewar waiting to happen, but maybe a worthwhile one.

Ubuntu fast enough for me

[Eravnrekaree]

I have not noticed performance problems from Ubuntu. Sometimes I think these small differences are pretty much unnoticeable to the common user. I would say that while Linux always seems fast and snappy to me, its Windows which has a truly noticeable sluggish feel.

I certainly do not think it is a good trade off in an OS to sacrifice features for an increase in speed which really is not noticeable. In most cases this is not necessary as many parts of a system can be made optional. The schedular and some core kernel systems effect the speed of the whole system, but most other components are optional, like X, like drivers, like Gnome, and so on.

Which also is the nice thing about X: the designers of X decided not to try to build in a bunch of heavy user interface junk into the X server, ironically which many people criticise. Excluding memory leaks in some drivers not related to X itself, the X protocol and server system is actually very efficient by todays standards and does not use much memory. Most memory usage is in caching and in bad drivers full of crappy code. Therefore you can run our own window manager without carrying a bunch of stuff you wont use. But the eye candy is there if you want it. People should choose how many features and memory or how little they wish to use.

Why turn off Compiz?

[argent]

Since OS X doesn't have an option to turn off compositing, shouldn't it be comparing Ubuntu with Compiz enabled?

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the difference is that OSX doesn't enforce fsync actually finishing the write to disk. A tradeoff of reliability for performance. On top of that, SQLite is typically compiled to aggressively fsync on most distributions.

Combine that with ext3 forcing fsync to flush all pending writes before returning, and things get really ugly.

Firefox 3 has already discovered this with their use of SQLite for history handling. See complaints about firefox causing disks to constantly spin up, and 30 second system stalls...

Re:Apple's Moving Aggressively On Performance

[freedom_india]

Actually you are right and wrong.
I have G4 iBook. I upgraded to Leopard last week from Tiger.
Tiger was the fastest OS i had.
The upgrade failed. iBook became terribly slow (no, spotlight was done).
I had to wipe and install.
Somehow it seems slower and less colorful now.
Panther was slow. Tiger was fastest. Leopard is like XP.
powerPC is something i like. It is a different architecture than the staid crappy x86. It was beautiful.
I don't know whom to blame: arrogant IBM or impatient Apple or us suckers.

Benchmark Aren't the Whole Story (as you know)

[aaaaaaargh!]

I use Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 daily on my laptops and OS X 10.5.5 on my iMac. In most daily tasks the actual speed is quite irrelevant, what counts is the 'snappiness' of the user interface. From this point of view I must say that OS X fails miserably and I'm seriously considering to install Ubuntu and forgetting about OS X on my iMac.

Fact is, Ubuntu on my old thinkpad T42 with 1GB RAM (already used when bought) feels much faster in daily use than OS X on my iMac 2Ghz Dual Core with 2GB RAM. Cocoa apps in general and particularly Mail.app feel slow and sluggish in comparison to the default Ubuntu apps like Evolution. Sorry Apple, but you've got to try harder if you want to keep your 'power users' in the long run!

It's not the distro either, it's the compiler.

[ciroknight]

Older Linuxes are built on GCC 3.x or GCC 4.1.x. Since 4.2.x, GCC has produced absolute garbage code when the Gentoo flags are not enabled.

Since most distros don't ship with --funroll-loops -O19 --ZOMG-MAKE-CODE-FAST, almost everyone has experienced a huge code speed drop. Meanwhile, Apple, knowing that all of their x86 machines support SSE2 or better has no qualms doing said incantations and benefiting from the speedups in autovectorization and other areas where the GCC hackers and Apple have been spending time.

This leads us to the conclusion that a) Older Linuxes were better optimized (by the compiler, not the coder), b) Newer Linuxes are able to benefit but... c) Newer Linuxes are not benefiting because of their one-size-fits-all nature.

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

[Stormx2]

It used to, but doesn't any more. Lack of demand.

And incase you're saying that PPC support is more important than the tens of thousands of devices linux supports, think again. I've never had a hardware setup ubuntu hasn't worked with. It can be tricky at times, but my digital camera works straight away, my phone does, my MP3 player, web camera, usb headset, usb/wireless mouse, etc etc etc. The hardware support in linux absolutely vast, and support for non-peripheral hardware is going to be pretty tight.

So yeah, linux supporting everything does mean lowest-common-denominator development, as the grandparent said.