| mach kernel
I have no hard data, because os X on my dual 450 G4 outperforms all of my other pieces of equipment, I can't bog it down properly. However, these are my current observations -
Ram allocation may be a little slow because of the way the VM abstraction works, so the specific allocating ram and destroying it may look bad on OS X. Also, (again subjective data) the hard drive access on OS X doesn't seem to be all that it could (should) be. I have 3 drives and I can copy stuff between them faster in 9 than in aqua. command line has it's own disk speed issues, in that it doesn't properly optimize reads and writes and parallelizes multiple read and write requests very badly.
I've gotten wierd and widely varied results about speed between the ppc platform, and suffice it to say that OS X is not fully optimized in all areas yet. I wouldn't be surprised if Perl is hella slow because it was compiled using the gnu compiler which (in my tests) has produced code that runs 1/2 to 1/3 as fast as codewarrior did for Mac 9.
It's not bad, but it may be a good bit slower than linux on some tasks, and because of the microkernel will probably have difficulty being faster than linux in single processor situations. However, networking in BSD seems way faster than networking in linux. (test with ipfw and natd) and sharing between processes is also good, so apache should rock. But, since I can outperform all of the requests I can make from my other machines on a 100Mbit network, I can't really tell you just yet how fast X really is.
 |