Re: Linux v.s. Mac OS-X Performance

[Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com>]

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007, Guido Neitzer wrote:

> Actually - In our test if just used with a similar load as pgbench (e.g. 
> typical web applications) Mac OS X  10.4.7 performed better then Yellow Dog 
> Linux (I was testing with G5 hardware) on the same hardware as soon as more 
> than about 90 concurrent clients were simulated.

At this point, that's just an interesting historical note.  Yellow Dog is 
not a particularly good Linux compared with the ones that have gotten 
years worth of performance tuning for Intel/AMD processors.  And you 
really can't extrapolate anything useful today from how it ran on a 
G5--that's two layers of obsolete.  The comparisons that matter now are 
Intel+Mac OS vs. Intel+a popular Linux aimed at servers.

As an unrelated note, I'm curious what you did with pgbench that you 
consider it a reasonable similation of a web application.  The default 
pgbench transaction is very write-heavy, and the read-only option 
available is way too simple to be realistic.  You'd need to pass in custom 
scripts to execute to get something that acted like a web app.  pgbench is 
an unruly tool, and there's many ways to run it that gives results that 
aren't so useful.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD