To put this in prespective, the adverage person uses 64,800,000 joules a month, or 18 kilowatts...
I had to read that in context twice. For a second it sounded like you were implying the military wanted to use human beings to power these laser machines, a la "The Matrix".
("It turns out we were wrong... the reason the machines began growing humans for power is because they couldn't afford the electric bill for their satellite television any more.")
Blockbuster has the most depressing selection of anime I've ever found. Hollywood Video has a slightly better selection, but it's still lacking. The greatest annoyance is when they buy the first two discs or tapes of a series like Neon Genesis Evangelion and never mind about the rest.
Even Netflix suffers this problem, and it's annoyed me enough to make me cancel my subscription in favor of GreenCine, another online DVD rental store that charges $2 more a month than Netflix but has an exponentially more complete anime collection. I've only used them a month and I'm already relying on them for my commercial- and edit-free anime fix.
(Sorry for some stray formatting of the tables; hopefully you can guess where the columns were)
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:
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:
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.
Was it over when the Nazi's[sic] bombed Pearl Harbor?
Sorry, I thought the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The Nazis were still busy somewhere in Europe. My world history isn't that great, but I could've sworn I read this somewhere.
Re:why not ask a real "who would win..." question
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Superhero Smackdown
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· Score: 2
Who would win if anti-lock brakes fought redhat 8.0?
RedHat, provided it had enough prep time to write the necessary drivers.
and some other "Hoo'd Win" topics...
on
Superhero Smackdown
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· Score: 5, Funny
...you should never, ever bring up in a geek forum:
Re:It's already been settled...
on
Superhero Smackdown
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· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, if I remember that story correctly, Batman ended up dead at the end of the fight. Granted, it was a self-administered, drug-induced temporary cardiac arrest to give the illusion of death, but it certainly implies that Batman didn't expect to actually win in a fight to the death. And if Superman hadn't been feeling charitable, he wouldn't have let Batman get away after his funeral, when Supes was the only one who could hear his heart start beating again.
Of course, this sort of thing is always subjective to the moods of the storywriter. Which is why you never, ever want to bring up this topic on the rec.arts.comics newsgroups.
I read that too. I, also, would like pants that can change color with the press of an electronic switch, or that can repair small cracks or rips automatically. Being able to change length from a one-inch break to cargo shorts to, well, nothin' would just be a bonus.
What politicians fail to understand is that the major draw to e-tailing is the lack of taxes....which only matters until the consumer places an order and realizes that, special offers notwithstanding, shipping charges usually outweigh anything the state tax system could or would impose.
No, it's the convenience that people like, of having the selection of a warehouse combined with the convenience of an instantly-searchable catalog. Any boloney about people going online just to dodge taxes is exactly that.
Would it be theoretically possible (not for this machine, maybe, but in the future) for TiVo to offer a CD/DVD with their software on it, enabling full TiVo support with a paid subscription? If so, I can see these machines someday becoming widespread and TiVo becoming the next AOL... a TVSP, perhaps?
Well, duh. ANY new technology costs too much when it's first introduced. Early adopters pick it up, help work out the bugs, and gradually the tech becomes more available and prices come down.
It's not supposed to "take off" at this price. This is the normal life cycle for any new consumer electronic device, and gradually (if the demand is there) they will take off or fail quietly.
Heck, who really cares? If it's on your DVD disc (unless your burned a coaster), you don't need it on the hard drive anymore. Stick it in your computer and file-share it from there if it's important to you.:)
As you said, this is annoying, but it's probably the least annoying annoyance they could make.
Ah, I guess that the TiBook is no longer a status symbol if you can run Windows on it.
You can run Windows on a TiBook using Connectix VirtualPC (and many do). Alternatively, as rgmoore pointed out, you can run any number of Linux and BSD distributions on this laptop instead of WinXP if that's your choice.
How can you seriously condemn a computer just because it ships with Windows, as if that was the only choice you ever had or ever will have with it?
Retailer Best Buy is aiming to take a bite out of Apple Computer with the release of a new, wide-screen notebook designed by Porsche.
Considering that Best Buy was/is the first retailer to sell iPods (Target having been recently announced as the second), I'd think they'd not want to risk slighting Apple with something like this. Even without the CNet article saying so, this laptop is clearly and squarely aimed at what is probably Apple's highest-margin computer.
But as someone else pointed out, countries can shape and redirect traffic back to their own TLD. How can you get google.com if you keep getting google.com.fr back?
If they're actively doing that, they surely have the power to block the offending sites as well, and they wouldn't have had to ask Google to stop matching them in the first place.
A [German|French] student needs information on WWII, and the political aftermath. Where can they find information on anti-semitism and white supremacy groups to add to the project?
At google.com, of course. Most of those students will know English well enough to navigate the site and set their preferences to return matches only from German/French-language pages, if that's what's desired.
Heh.:) I can't really say I know/knew him, only worked with him for one day on that one project. But it was interesting and educational enough to see how he worked that it left a permanent impression.
If by some chance you knew a very tall, skinny blonde guy who worked on the NCSA web site for a few years before moving across the state, then that was me.:)
at what point does the ADA/public-regulated support end?
When it becomes unreasonable to expect it. "Bumper car lanes" on interstate highways qualify as unreasonable. Widening the aisles in a grocery store and/or adding a ramp to the curb in front of the entryway do not. Yes, making those changes cost money, but it's not so excessive as to be unreasonable.
Adding support for text-based screen readers to a Web site is even easier. No construction, no unloading and reloading the aisles, just hiring someone to push some bits around. If the site is designed in such a high-tech way that it's impossible to make it text-accessible without an overhaul, then they really should have thought about that in the first place. You don't even have to give up your pretty animated Flash site to supplement it with a non-Flash, Lynx-navigable version of the same content.
Personally, I think it's entirely reasonable for the ADA to apply to American companies running English web sites for American audiences, and I hope this ruling gets overturned. Of all the consessions a company could make to the ADA, this is probably the easiest and least expensive of them all.
what do you think would happen if the feds mandated a HTML-ADA spec???
They don't need to mandate one. W3C already recommends one. Why do you think ALT tags have been around since browsers could support images?
make sure all the information on a web site is available as text, then a text to voice synthesizer can easily read it.
Or a Braille reader. I used to work at NCSA (you know, Mosaic and httpd?) and we had a web site redesign we wanted to run by an employee who wrote code, full-time and quite well, and also happened to be blind.
I wasn't sure what to expect, but he had a seeing-eye dog under his desk and a monochrome monitor with a long horizontal Braille outputter in front of his keyboard. If you've seen "Sneakers", you know what it looks like: a long bar with three rows of holes, grouped into eight or ten chunks of six. When a page was read by the device, tiny rods jumped up from inside the bar to create the six-bump patterns of Braille letters.
What impressed me is how fast he could read using this device. What amazed me was that he only seemed to use it when reading code; for normal English text, he used a text-to-speech reader which he'd slowly cranked the speed on over the years. It spoke words in what I could only describe as a buzz, at ten or maybe forty times normal human speed, and he understood it perfectly. Just like learning to speed read, I suppose, except with your ears instead of your eyes.
I learned that in order to make the Web site accessible to him, I simply had to make sure it was completely navigable in a text-only browser like Lynx. If text was clearly broken into paragraphs, images were labeled with ALT tags, and navigation was possible through ordinary hyperlinks instead of requiring DHTML or DOM support, everything was okay. It was really that simple.
People who design sites exclusively for the IE4+ market aren't just naive, they're inconsiderate. A one-time effort to add 5% more code to your site in the form of ALT tags and text-based navigation makes a world of difference to the 5% of people who can't use the latest and greatest technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing compared to the world-record-holding Aludium Q-36 Pumpkin Modulator (A "Marvin the Martian" reference for those who don't watch enough Warner Bros. cartoons).
To put this in prespective, the adverage person uses 64,800,000 joules a month, or 18 kilowatts...
I had to read that in context twice. For a second it sounded like you were implying the military wanted to use human beings to power these laser machines, a la "The Matrix".
("It turns out we were wrong... the reason the machines began growing humans for power is because they couldn't afford the electric bill for their satellite television any more.")
Blockbuster has the most depressing selection of anime I've ever found. Hollywood Video has a slightly better selection, but it's still lacking. The greatest annoyance is when they buy the first two discs or tapes of a series like Neon Genesis Evangelion and never mind about the rest.
Even Netflix suffers this problem, and it's annoyed me enough to make me cancel my subscription in favor of GreenCine, another online DVD rental store that charges $2 more a month than Netflix but has an exponentially more complete anime collection. I've only used them a month and I'm already relying on them for my commercial- and edit-free anime fix.
(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.
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Was it over when the Nazi's[sic] bombed Pearl Harbor?
Sorry, I thought the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The Nazis were still busy somewhere in Europe. My world history isn't that great, but I could've sworn I read this somewhere.
Who would win if anti-lock brakes fought redhat 8.0?
RedHat, provided it had enough prep time to write the necessary drivers.
...you should never, ever bring up in a geek forum:
Spider-Man versus Wolverine
Superman versus Hulk
Thanos versus everybody
The Joker versus Hostess Fruit Pies
CowboyNeal versus Grodd the Gorilla
Actually, if I remember that story correctly, Batman ended up dead at the end of the fight. Granted, it was a self-administered, drug-induced temporary cardiac arrest to give the illusion of death, but it certainly implies that Batman didn't expect to actually win in a fight to the death. And if Superman hadn't been feeling charitable, he wouldn't have let Batman get away after his funeral, when Supes was the only one who could hear his heart start beating again.
Of course, this sort of thing is always subjective to the moods of the storywriter. Which is why you never, ever want to bring up this topic on the rec.arts.comics newsgroups.
...would inevitably end up looking like Hamtaro.
Which is why my first impulse upon reading this headline was "Who the hell cares!?"
I read that too. I, also, would like pants that can change color with the press of an electronic switch, or that can repair small cracks or rips automatically. Being able to change length from a one-inch break to cargo shorts to, well, nothin' would just be a bonus.
What politicians fail to understand is that the major draw to e-tailing is the lack of taxes. ...which only matters until the consumer places an order and realizes that, special offers notwithstanding, shipping charges usually outweigh anything the state tax system could or would impose.
No, it's the convenience that people like, of having the selection of a warehouse combined with the convenience of an instantly-searchable catalog. Any boloney about people going online just to dodge taxes is exactly that.
Would it be theoretically possible (not for this machine, maybe, but in the future) for TiVo to offer a CD/DVD with their software on it, enabling full TiVo support with a paid subscription? If so, I can see these machines someday becoming widespread and TiVo becoming the next AOL... a TVSP, perhaps?
...tell him your OS isn't supported. I'd like to see them try and get anything like that running on my OS X box, or on a Linux partition. :)
Well, duh. ANY new technology costs too much when it's first introduced. Early adopters pick it up, help work out the bugs, and gradually the tech becomes more available and prices come down.
It's not supposed to "take off" at this price. This is the normal life cycle for any new consumer electronic device, and gradually (if the demand is there) they will take off or fail quietly.
Heck, who really cares? If it's on your DVD disc (unless your burned a coaster), you don't need it on the hard drive anymore. Stick it in your computer and file-share it from there if it's important to you. :)
As you said, this is annoying, but it's probably the least annoying annoyance they could make.
What you think Alan Greenspan doesn't use Excel?
Only because MS gives him free copies in exchange for keeping the market up.
Ah, I guess that the TiBook is no longer a status symbol if you can run Windows on it.
You can run Windows on a TiBook using Connectix VirtualPC (and many do). Alternatively, as rgmoore pointed out, you can run any number of Linux and BSD distributions on this laptop instead of WinXP if that's your choice.
How can you seriously condemn a computer just because it ships with Windows, as if that was the only choice you ever had or ever will have with it?
Retailer Best Buy is aiming to take a bite out of Apple Computer with the release of a new, wide-screen notebook designed by Porsche.
Considering that Best Buy was/is the first retailer to sell iPods (Target having been recently announced as the second), I'd think they'd not want to risk slighting Apple with something like this. Even without the CNet article saying so, this laptop is clearly and squarely aimed at what is probably Apple's highest-margin computer.
The notebook was designed by Porsche Design GmbH
More accurately, it was re-designed by them.
...it still wouldn't be large enough to connect a network cable.
But as someone else pointed out, countries can shape and redirect traffic back to their own TLD. How can you get google.com if you keep getting google.com.fr back?
If they're actively doing that, they surely have the power to block the offending sites as well, and they wouldn't have had to ask Google to stop matching them in the first place.
A [German|French] student needs information on WWII, and the political aftermath. Where can they find information on anti-semitism and white supremacy groups to add to the project?
At google.com, of course. Most of those students will know English well enough to navigate the site and set their preferences to return matches only from German/French-language pages, if that's what's desired.
Heh. :) I can't really say I know/knew him, only worked with him for one day on that one project. But it was interesting and educational enough to see how he worked that it left a permanent impression.
:)
If by some chance you knew a very tall, skinny blonde guy who worked on the NCSA web site for a few years before moving across the state, then that was me.
All I can say is that if you think of this as a test, I'm happy it passed.
:-)
I'm assuming those servers weren't running any kind of Microsoft OS?
at what point does the ADA/public-regulated support end?
When it becomes unreasonable to expect it. "Bumper car lanes" on interstate highways qualify as unreasonable. Widening the aisles in a grocery store and/or adding a ramp to the curb in front of the entryway do not. Yes, making those changes cost money, but it's not so excessive as to be unreasonable.
Adding support for text-based screen readers to a Web site is even easier. No construction, no unloading and reloading the aisles, just hiring someone to push some bits around. If the site is designed in such a high-tech way that it's impossible to make it text-accessible without an overhaul, then they really should have thought about that in the first place. You don't even have to give up your pretty animated Flash site to supplement it with a non-Flash, Lynx-navigable version of the same content.
Personally, I think it's entirely reasonable for the ADA to apply to American companies running English web sites for American audiences, and I hope this ruling gets overturned. Of all the consessions a company could make to the ADA, this is probably the easiest and least expensive of them all.
what do you think would happen if the feds mandated a HTML-ADA spec???
They don't need to mandate one. W3C already recommends one. Why do you think ALT tags have been around since browsers could support images?
make sure all the information on a web site is available as text, then a text to voice synthesizer can easily read it.
Or a Braille reader. I used to work at NCSA (you know, Mosaic and httpd?) and we had a web site redesign we wanted to run by an employee who wrote code, full-time and quite well, and also happened to be blind.
I wasn't sure what to expect, but he had a seeing-eye dog under his desk and a monochrome monitor with a long horizontal Braille outputter in front of his keyboard. If you've seen "Sneakers", you know what it looks like: a long bar with three rows of holes, grouped into eight or ten chunks of six. When a page was read by the device, tiny rods jumped up from inside the bar to create the six-bump patterns of Braille letters.
What impressed me is how fast he could read using this device. What amazed me was that he only seemed to use it when reading code; for normal English text, he used a text-to-speech reader which he'd slowly cranked the speed on over the years. It spoke words in what I could only describe as a buzz, at ten or maybe forty times normal human speed, and he understood it perfectly. Just like learning to speed read, I suppose, except with your ears instead of your eyes.
I learned that in order to make the Web site accessible to him, I simply had to make sure it was completely navigable in a text-only browser like Lynx. If text was clearly broken into paragraphs, images were labeled with ALT tags, and navigation was possible through ordinary hyperlinks instead of requiring DHTML or DOM support, everything was okay. It was really that simple.
People who design sites exclusively for the IE4+ market aren't just naive, they're inconsiderate. A one-time effort to add 5% more code to your site in the form of ALT tags and text-based navigation makes a world of difference to the 5% of people who can't use the latest and greatest technologies.