# linux vs OSX performance comparissons?



## spike (Apr 20, 2001)

Hi,

Does anybody have any Linux vs OSX performance comparissons?

The reason I ask is:
a) Everybody seems to moan how slow OSX is, but most of that seems to be moans about the gui. I'd like to know how quick it is as, oh say, a web server or file server.

b) My buddy, who is a big Linux boy, came over the other night and played around with OSX. He liked it but thought it was kinda slow. He did some stuff in perl that wrote out data to RAM, essentialy just filling it up by doubling the size of an array each time or some such. (I dont really know what he was doing, Im new to this stuff  He said that was very slow amongst other things.

Im running a G4 PB 400 with 196MB of RAM. I guess he runs a fast Intel box with a fast drive in it which is gonna speed up stuff like that, but still Id like to be able to show him some hard data on just how fast (or slow) OSX is.

Its often said that Performance comparissions between OS9, Linux and Windows NT were not fair because of the limitations of OS9 and once we had OSX we would see the full benifits of the G4.

So whats the deal here?

How fast is OSX and how does it stand up compared to Linux on Intel?
What about OSX server, is that faster?
What about OSX vs PPC Linux on G4s?


I need ammuninition guys!!! 

Thanks, spike.


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## deep_thought (Apr 20, 2001)

Before installing OSX I had SUSE Linux 6.4 on my powerbook and it was faster...


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## AdmiralAK (Apr 20, 2001)

Is SUSE linux for PPC any Good ?
I was considering getting it for my secondary partition, but ended up getting LinuxPPC 200.  I wasnt really impressed because my modem wanst recognized, and I could only use GNOME (and enlightenment I think).  I took it off to put OS X on.

THe problem with linux was that I could not run my mac programs without jumping through loops (like setting up MOL.. I was too lazy to do it )



Admiral


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## deep_thought (Apr 21, 2001)

SUSE Linux is not bad, altough it has some 'children illnesses'. So there wasn't a reasonable working driver for my powerbook with Swissgerman keyboard layout. Fortunately i know SUSE for Intel and so I could fix the most problems. But till MacOSX it was (next to other Linuxes) the only way to develop and test PHP-Scripts on a mac.

To run my mac-programs I made a second partition with OS9 (the laziest way.

d.t.


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## ginoledesma (Apr 21, 2001)

I tried out Darwin on another PPC box (G4/400 256MB RAM) without Aqua and it was kinda fast. However, I wouldn't know how to rate speed on a pure CLI environment. I doubt SETI@Home would be a good benchmark.

Mac OS X's sluggishness is perhaps attributed to Aqua and other layers on top of Darwin, such as Quartz and Classic. I mention the latter since I've found that my Mac OS X system is "ok" without Classic loaded. However, surfing (using OmniWeb) isn't as snappy as it was in Mac OS 9.x.

I've run LinuxPPC 2000 before as well as YellowDog Linux. Working with GNOME was faster than working with Aqua. Unfortunately, I didn't stay long with Linux on PPC since the apps I needed to run wasn't available. There were other problems as well, such as the delay in updates for PPC packages. But the clincher was: why buy a Mac for Linux when I can get better performance, more hardware support, better support, and most of all, *cheaper prices* with Linux on Intel hardware.

I have two Linux boxes running RedHat. Both are Pentium II 450/192 MB RAM/S3 ViRGE systems. Working in xfce on those systems is just as fast as Aqua, although Aqua seems to slow down when I run more and more apps.

Overall, Mac OS X's speed is "kinda ok", although it could be much, much better. Surfing with a lot of windows and other apps open becomes a pain, though.


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## strobe (Apr 26, 2001)

If you're going to compare GNOME to OS X you better make the comparison fair considering:

 GNOME sucks

 GNOME apps have no interface abstraction

 OS X apps look better and behave consistently

 Quartz can more easily be color calibrated

 OS X has better APIs

 GNOME sucks

 GNOME sucks

Perhaps a better test would not compare apples to oranges, or Apples to piles of doo doo.

Comparing execution of shell commands on LinuxPPC and Darwin for example.


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## theed (Apr 26, 2001)

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.


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## spike (Apr 27, 2001)

Thanks for the input.

This is an interesting link:

"On a related note, the high level of performance both the Apache and Zeus servers achieved during the Mac OS X tests was very similar to their respective performance under Linux, suggesting that the Mac OS is finally a legitimate option for enterprise-level servers."

http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2706908,00.html


I still havent managed to find any hard data yet. It looks like no one has done any real testing. Which I guess is a good thing if OSX isnt upto speed to yet. I guess the whole thing is too early to call but it looks promising.


Thanks, spike.


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## CJNE (Apr 27, 2001)

I started out buying a cube because i thought os x looked so cool. It was kinda cool at first but i soon got annoyed by small things like: 
* it's horribly slow  
* netinfo/hosts isn't working with bsd apps
* almost no usable native apps
* no virtual desktops (space.app lacks too much in that area to be usable)
* Xdarwin is incredibly slow and does not support international keyboards 

and so on

So without a usable X server on it i couldn't even run Xemacs, one of the things that i must have (virtual desktops is the other must).

So i ended up installing LinuxPPC on another partition. 
It was FAST!! in comparsion with os x.
XFree86 v 4 is also FAST.
And everything just worked (compiling all good opensource stuff out there etc), this was like heaven.

Add to that MacOnLinux which works pretty much like classic and Ximian GNOME 1.4 (GNOME by the way does not suck, especially this dist is very nice) and you have something that's in my opinion is far better than os x in it's current state. 

The conclusion is that if you, like me, wanted os x mainly because of the unix subsytem combined with nice gui, go for linux instead until os x gets it right.
Once os x is usable i'll prbably switch back, i still think that the idea is good 

When it comes to performance as a webserver, it's just a waste of money considering you can get a much cheaper intel-linux machine that probably works much better to.

Well, i guess i'm done now


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## strobe (Apr 28, 2001)

The reason why LinuxPPC's XFree86 is faster is because it's accelerated. XDarwin isn't, and can't be because DRI is incompatible with the video card driver architecture OS X uses. X11 sucks anyway.

Virtual screens suck ass. You should have bought a dual G4 and several cheap video cards instead.

If you want something expecting ancient /etc/ files like passwd then use nidump and niload, yeesh.

GNOME does indeed suck. Only the lowered expectations of the Linux experience could elevate it to non-sucktitude


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## ginoledesma (Apr 28, 2001)

Oh yes, one note I forgot to include, I prefer xfce over the bloated GNOME/KDE.

One good way to test speed would be Apache, I guess, but I can't install that right now since I have to do stuff on Mac OS 9.


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