PPC Linux vs. Mac OS X Server: Linux Edges Out 397
Spencerian writes "Mac OS X is a very promising new BSD variant, but how does it rate as a server? Byte.com writer Moshe Bar has made an extensively balanced performance comparison of Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 versus SuSE Linux PPC with the 2.4.19 kernel. Both operating systems ran on the same hardware: an Xserve 1U rack mount server from Apple. While /.ers may guess (correctly) at his results, Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 wasn't as far behind the curve as you might think. Performance might've been better if Moshe had Mac OS X Server 10.2, with its faster GUI and other enhancements, but still, it appears that Mac OS X Server 10.1 was doing pretty good for a 1-year old."
Wouldn't it make more sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
It wouldn't ... (Score:3, Informative)
FreeBSD PPC support is still wearing diapers, see the current status [freebsd.org].
First go get a powerpc freebsd cdrom (Score:4, Interesting)
Netbsd and Openbsd are the only bsd distro's that are stable and out of alpha for the powerpc platform. Last time I looked at the powerpc freebsd project, the big news was that perl compilied! Obviously its very alpha and would do injustice to freebsd because the optimizations are not there and that is assuming FreeBSD would be mature enough to run these tests. Can mysql even compile on it yet?
Also it has been said here before and I will say it again that the kernel in MacOSX is not Freebsd based!
Its based on Mach and Nextstep! Only some of the libraries and a few programs have been ported. All the i/o code is based on Mach and not FreeBSD. Its the i/o code that needs some work.
Also I expect a micro-kernel vs a macro-kernel flamewar to show up on this thread to explain why this is. Since both FreeBSD and Linux are macrokernel based, all of the i/o code runs in the kernel. On MacOSX most of the i/o runs in userland. They really are apples to oranges.
Re:Wouldn't it make more sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
you're looking to see which overall solution has
more bang for the buck, then sure. But the author
was probably aiming to compare operating systems,
in which case using different hardware would
introduce a raft of unrelated variables.
Grammar (Score:3, Funny)
And "was doing pretty good" is written pretty well for a ten-year-old.
shameless karma whoring (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe it means the opposite of "was doing pretty evil". Presumably describing a Windows/IIS server configuration.
Re:Grammar (Score:3, Insightful)
MacOSX is over 10% slower in most test, that sure as hell is not pretty good. That's bad, very bad.
Especially if you realize that PPC is MacOSX' major (in fact the only) platform, while for Linux it's just a minor platform that receives not nearly as much attention as for example x86.
And I guess you could still squeeze out some performance gain if you use a source-based distro like Gentoo.
Re:Grammar (Score:3, Informative)
403 Forbidden (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, a self-aware server that _understands_ the Slashdot effect. I wonder if it is part of their mythology.
Re:403 Forbidden (Score:2, Funny)
It's a good thing (and not just because Linux won) (Score:5, Interesting)
Now let's see OS X Server kill, er, compared to Windows 2000/.NET... Run, Bill, run!
Re:It's a good thing (and not just because Linux w (Score:3, Interesting)
Hear, hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
POSIX systems have extensibility, portability, multiple programming languages, a networked windowing system with your choice of WM/DE, TRUE multiuser capability, efficiency and stability.
What does Windows have? Most of the above, specifically minus portability, the networked windows system (Terminal Services doesn't cut the cheese), efficiency (in recent versions) and stability. What Windows doesn't give you is choice. I argue Windows is not any more "designed for the user" than Unix, but rather that in Windows (or at least in each version) everything is only One Microsoft Way, and you cannot do much to change that. Microsoft also has mindshare and a $50+ stock price.
To the topic at hand now. Apple now more or less equals Unix as far as the OS is concerned. Specifically, OS X is POSIX plus everything being pretty, and there being an Apple Way (often, multiple Apple ways such as the choice of APIs) and a BSD Way to do most things.
This is why I argue OS X, now that it is proving itself as a server, can advance ground on the desktop and on the server.
Re:Hear, hear... (Score:2, Insightful)
source
In name only (Score:3, Insightful)
FTR, for drivers, Windows provides some POSIX support. This is why your hosts file is in a directory called etc in system32\drivers, for example. But Windows breaks POSIX in many other smaller ways. I'd really question how MS got that certification for Win2k.
Still wondering... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Still wondering... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Still wondering... (Score:5, Informative)
Having a GUI on the server allows for simpler administration. Many folks that I know, that don't have a GUI on their server, also don't have a disply. Yet, they use VNC to more easily administer the server - or something like webmin or linuxconf in HTTP mode. Either way, you're still running a GUI.
Of course, console based administration is fine, too - but, Apple is about making things simple, even if you weren't raised a systems administrator. And contrary to Microsoft, their definition of "easy" doesn't correlate with the level of insecurity the system has.
Cheers.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:2)
> mode. Either way, you're still running a GUI.
Not on the server.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me - I have a FreeBSD box that I'm too stupid/time-burdened to get X running on it's crappy video card. But it serves up a GUI over VNC just fine.
I have another FreeBSD box that doesen't *have* a video card, and, of course, it servers KDE over VNC just fine. When I show it to MCSE types - theh sit there and stare. "b..b..but... I doesen't have a video card! How does it do that?"
Fun to play with their little minds.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:3, Funny)
As if windows can't do that? With VNC, no less? Maybe you'd need a card to set it up - I don't know, but I'd bet that the machine you use did when you installed it, too (though I won't bet $ on that
Actually, I have launched VNC blind on a windows box. Wait, now I'm just sounding like a sick bastard...
Re:Still wondering... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure that Sun servers can be made to work the same way.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why bother having a GUI itself, when there's no display? Why is this better than having some admin apps that use X, so use the display system of whatever computer you happen to be at, as opposed to running a GUI that will mostly not be seen.
Of course, console based administration is fine, too - but, Apple is about making things simple, even if you weren't raised a systems administrator. And contrary to Microsoft, their definition of "easy" doesn't correlate with the level of insecurity the system has.
Not sure I can agree with that. Microsofts systems except in a few rare cases are not really inherantly insecure, the insecurity comes from the fact that untrained people are acting as admins, and don't really know what they're doing. So they forget to update, they run more services than they should, and so on and so forth.
I don't believe a GUI, regardless of which megacorp made it, can replace proper training. If anything OS X Server will kind of have the same problem, as people will say "ah, if I use MacOS I won't have to think" - oops, that extra service you were running just got rooted.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Still wondering... (Score:2, Insightful)
Granted, what you get when you do request it (IIS) is crappy to administrate and has the worst security record ever, but it is not installed by default. And when you have installed it, it does not start by itself. It does not come with "no pasword". Etc.
That is just something I can only assume that whiny youngsters said to their parents/professors/whoever that was really mad when the computer got hit by some virus. Maybe you are one of those, covering your *ss still?
On a side note, last I tried Mac OS X, it did by default install (and maybe even start?) an Apache server. But that was a long time ago, and it may have been a beta release.
The real fact is that if Apple was as hated as MS, they would have as many exploits, and that probably goes for Linux. Or maybe it is that noone would pay that insane money for a machine that can't play their games just to see how it could be rooted...
Re:Still wondering... (Score:2)
Re:Still wondering... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Still wondering... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, I use a shell ten hours a day, I'm not disputing that there are very many things for which it's a fantastic tool. But carefully selecting how you measure "simplicity" in this way is just being gratuitously obtuse.
*items in my current path on my primary linux box
Re:Still wondering... (Score:2)
I also wonder why a 'faster GUI' would have any impact on server performance.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, thats like .04% wasted processor cycles.
Note to the clueless, the GUI doesn't consume much processor time if nothing is writing to the screen.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:5, Informative)
The other issue is that if some MCSE type is not comfortable at all working on another platform then they will ALLWAYS recommend a Microsoft solution. If they walk up to a system and it has a GUI that is similar to Windows and they can do their job, they tend to be more open to using that technology. I believe that this describes a lot of people, in that they don't want to spend a lot of time learning something totally new.
I was a Novell/Microsoft guy who decided to give Linux a try about two years ago. I found the migration easy. I used the GUI as a crutch until I could learn the command line equivilant, and found Mandrake and RedHat tools very easy to work with. Without the GUI I would still be pushing NetWare and Windows. To be honest probably Windows...
Lastly, I have converted most of our business over to Linux now... It has run great. I do miss a good directory service and the ability to add disk space to a volume on the fly (yes I know about LVMs, but most distros don't default to it) oh yeah and a good free equivilant to Groupwise/Exchange server.
What a mean webserver! (Score:2, Funny)
Purposefully denied? (Score:2, Insightful)
It would be simple to check the referring URL and if it matches slashdot.org to send back a 403.
Has Byte been bytten in the past by the slashdot effect? (no typo - just a bad pun)
Re:Purposefully denied? (Score:4, Funny)
Purposefully denied? - a little clearer (Score:2)
I should have been more verbose.
What I mean is, in a CGI script or dynamic page that is serving up the article, it is probably checking the HTTP referrer header and checking if it matches "slashdot.org".
If not, it serves the page. If so, big fat 403.
GUI? (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought it's about servers. How is it important for a server to have "faster GUI"?
Re:GUI? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:GUI? (Score:2)
Even on the fastest machine it is DOG slow, has barely any usable functions.. whats even more shameful is that it seems to be a butchered version of XF86..
Mac OS X VS FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, byte.com is
Re:Mac OS X VS FreeBSD (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe you'd like to see a Darwin vs FreeBSD or an OS X vs NetBSD article? But once again, results would be kind of pointless since Darwin isn't tuned for x86 and doesn't include the kind of hardware support you would expect from a server OS. The OS X vs NetBSD one might be useful, but since not that many people run NetBSD it might not.
I think the point was to compare 2 fairly common server operating systems on a level playing field. Of course there will still be people who argue that it was unfair and if one or the other had been tuned someway the results would be better.
Re:Mac OS X VS FreeBSD (Score:2)
"FreeBSD/PowerPC currently boots almost to the point of reaching single-user mode."
So its almost to the point where a single user can run processes, I don't consider it a real viable comparision canidate
SWAP File/Partition? (Score:5, Informative)
Whereas on OS X it should have been default(ed) to a SWAP file.
The difference in performance is quite considerable because for a SWAP partition the OS doesn't have to go through a lot of IO file system code.
Re:SWAP File/Partition? (Score:2)
really its a bad comparison but if you tuned them file I/O on linux would be much faster simply because of the filesystem
not too sure how the mach kernel in MacOS does the Unix Lites either so that would have impacted performance
ah well what matters is functionality and they are about equal in my eyes with MacOS winning the desktop and linux the server
regards
John Jones
Better comparison: MacOS X vs *BSD (Score:2)
Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid Example:
I haven't benchmarked FreeBSD vs Linux and I really don't care - all my file servers are FreeBSD because I'm expensive and learning Linux is not cost effective (for me). YMMV.
Re:Eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe to you a 10% performance difference is not much, but for large sites, performance is often the deciding factor. The faster you can serve your customers, the happier they'll be.
Re:Eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
In those cases the ease of management will likely be a bigger factor than overall speed. If overall speed is that important you really need someone who is an expert in Linux or BSD, knows how to eck out every bit of speed, knows security up the yazoo, etc. And of course your department will have to pay for this guy. And that ends up being near $100,000 a year once you start including benefits etc. (Or more if you have several folks)
For a more regular IT staff who doesn't want to spend that much time or effort XServe, like the equivalent offerings from DELL, Sun or Compact, is a nice server. As I said for ASP I still think Sun might be a better choice. But it really depends upon what you are doing.
10% is not a big difference, even for a large site (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was running YahooMail ops we used massive farms of FreeBSD boxes, not because it was the absolute best server PC OS when it came to performance (although at the time I think that it probably was) but because it was what we knew best. Filo was a BSD hacker and we had a collection of ops guys who knew that particular OS inside and out -- if there was a problem we could track it down and figure things out, we didn't have to start guessing or need to make an appeal to newsgroups or mailing lists for help. For a large site performance numbers like these are one factor, but it is not the only factor and is often not even the most important factor. Maintenance and management can often be a more important cost factor then raw performance, sometimes it is something as "trivial" as driver support (or even raw performance differences among various drivers and OS configuration options) or what the team doing the technical evaluation feels comfortable with using and supporting.
Re:Eh? (Score:2)
not surprising (Score:2)
Where OS X seems behind Linux in terms of performance is memory footprint and graphics speed. In Moshe's server benchmarks, OS X used a lot more memory. Also, take a look at the memory footprint of the OS X display server and the OS X GUI applications--they are usually several times as large as comparable X11 functionality. And the raw graphics performance of the OS X display server is behind X11 in my experience (but do your own measurements if you don't believe me).
Re:not surprising (Score:2)
I'd like to see him repeat it, with a few changes (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Get the latest Jaguar
b) Go to Apple and SuSE and get advice on tuning
c) If it is available under SuSE, use gcc 3.1 for compiling
Moshe admitted that there was probably alot of optimizations that he missed. I'd like to see them both tuned for speed and then compare them.
Re:I'd like to see him repeat it, with a few chang (Score:2)
Still, an impressive showing for OSX. I think Apple's strength over the next several years will continue to be the desktop, but it looks like they might do well in the server market also.
Oh yeah, I also think the Xserve is on of the most desirable pieces of hardware on the planet. They're purrty.
Re:I'd like to see him repeat it, with a few chang (Score:4, Informative)
Type this on a macOS X box:
sysctl -a
Some of these settings are sub-optimal for a server (at least with Jaguar, not necessarily OS X server). You could do something like this:
sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=2097152
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
to increase your TCP buffers, for instance. I know there are more areas for performance tuning, but I don't know them well. Search for sysctl on the web and you're bound to find some.
Re:I'd like to see him repeat it, with a few chang (Score:2, Interesting)
Biggest optimizations he missed: turning off Aqua! I kind of have to take this whole test with a grain of salt, you're not really doing justice to a spec test when you have two gui's running taking away performance from what your trying to test: the server.
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.
Come on Moche, do a little research and login as "> console".
Re:I'd like to see him repeat it, with a few chang (Score:3, Informative)
d) Try the tests while logged into the Mac in console mode, by typing
at the system login screen.As others have noted, a dormant window manager shouldn't consume any processor time, but if you can disable it on both machines that's a more accurate comparison than trying to get an X11/KDE combination to perform similarly to Aqua. That itself would be a long, complex, and ultimately probably not very interesting comparison to run -- suffice to say that if you can make both window servers fall out of the picture the comparison should be more accurate.
The slashdotted text (Score:3, Informative)
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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Re:The slashdotted text (Score:5, Insightful)
And a Perl script launching "wget", instead of just using LWP? Whuh? Huh?
So, all these benchmarks are suspect. Beware. The author is either confused, or the editors mangled his message.
Re:The slashdotted text (Score:3, Insightful)
If this was an attempt at testing the speed of perl, yeah, he really should've used LWP.
Why Darwin (Score:2, Interesting)
Why did Apple choose to go out and start a new kernel project when they could have just based OS X on the Linux kernel instead? They could have gained so much ground and lost so little. It's worked for so many other companies--why not Apple?
Re:Why Darwin (Score:2)
The kernel that the Darwin OS runs atop is far from new. The Mach kernel has been around for years, not sure of the exact dates, but almost if not as long as the Linux kernel.
The decision to base Mac OS X on Darwin/NeXT was not just a decision about which direction to take with the kernel. There were plenty of business considerations a well, some of which centered around getting Steve back in da Apple crib.
Re:Why Darwin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why Darwin (Score:3, Insightful)
The BSD development process is slow and steady. It doesn't have 4 different threading models in the tree. It puts stability above new features. All good things for Apple.
It would have been nice though.....
Re:Why Darwin (Score:3, Insightful)
Because NeXTStep was BSD-on-mach, and MacOS X on Xserve is essentially the next (forgive the pun) iteration of the NeXT Cube. (I am posting this from OmniWeb 2.0 running on NeXTStep 3.3 on an original Color Turbo).
Re:Why Darwin (Score:5, Informative)
The Darwin kernel is based on Mach. While not a performance demon, Mach offers some very interesting advantages for Apple. Primarily, they have full rights to the code and can relicense it, whereas Linux would have bound them by the GPL. There's some technical advantages too, though.
First of all, Mach was/is developed by Avi Tevanian. Avi is a old buddy of Steve Jobs and they've been working together since the NeXT days. Any questions about architecture? Ask the guy that wrote it, he's just down the hall.
Secondly, the micro-kernelish nature of Mach makes Darwin (and OS X) a highly portable platform. With Motorola on the ropes, being able to shift platforms quickly is far more important than raw kernel speed. Darwin gives Apple hardware options, and options are a very good thing for Apple to have right now.
Lastly, there's momentum. AFAIK, their kernel crew came over from NeXT, where they'd been using Mach since the eighties. Why bother learning the ins and outs of a new architecture, when you've already got something that works? Better to extend what you've already got.
Darwin offers a pretty solid foundation for Apple. Moving to Linux would have taken a large effort for questionable gains.
Also in "today's" headlines... (Score:4, Insightful)
* Red Hat Linux v4.2 used in tests.
Hmmm (Score:2)
Isn't testing OS X vs Linux on Apple hardware kind of giving OS X an unfair advantage as Apple know the ins and outs of their proprietary hardware so can throw in all kinds of optimizations?
I'd be more interested to see Darwin/x86 go against Linux for web serving, especially if you throw in the Tux kernel module web server (good for performance).
Why use an old version of Mac OS X? (Score:5, Informative)
2) Moshe is not smart enough to boot Mac OS X into command line, "Since for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to shut down the GUI environment of OS X" -- Moshe "I can't use Google" Bar. Here's a tip Moshi, when the log on screen pops up, type ">console" [osxfaq.com] in the user line.
3) MacSlash [macslash.org] has already dealt with this.
Re:Why use an old version of Mac OS X? (Score:2)
I thought the point of the XServe was that you didn't need the command line? Why would being "smart" have anything to do with it anyway, the stuff in that tutorial you linked to is not at all obvious, and Apple has conditioned everybody to think that everything is always obvious on a Mac.
If you don't need a GUI, then why bother with an XServe. And if you do, then why do you want to boot it into the command line?
Re:Why use an old version of Mac OS X? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its called "fact checking". If you are publishing for a magazine, its a requirement. Moshe could of typed this [google.com] in Google and figured it out quickly. You would expect a person that is doing benchmarking of a product for publication to actually understand how to set it up for the test. Not doing this has made this article a waste of time.
Not FreeBSD Derived (Score:2, Insightful)
Saying MacOS X is derived from FreeBSD is like saying that Windows XP is derived from System V because they both have POSIX compatibility layers. It's stupid and wrong.
MacSlash ran this... (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 wasn't as far behind the curve as you might think. Performance might've been better if Moshe had Mac OS X Server 10.2, with its faster GUI...
From the article itself..
The included AGP 4X card with 64 MB of dedicated graphics RAM is a screamer...
Ok, my question is this: It's a server-to-server comparison. What relevance does the speed of the GUI , and the performance of the graphics card, have? IMHO, the GUI should be shut down if at all possible for any server application.
bigger than VM page size: (Score:5, Informative)
Still very nice (Score:5, Informative)
optimizations (Score:2, Insightful)
It wouldn't surprise me that the implementation of Linux sendmail (for instance) has been tweaked to run faster than the OSX version.
Obviously, the excuse "its not the OS, its the apps" holds little water... since the OS is only as good as what you run on it... but still...
This is a big win for Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
I love OS X for my desktop. I don't think I'd use it on a server because I can build a cheaper server using Linux to do everything OS X does and better. But from a desktop standpoint I find the GUI and applications a more pleasant experience than what's available for Linux.
So the fact that I can run Apache, PERL, PHP, MySQL, GNU tools, BSD userland, AND Office X, Photoshop, RTCW, Jedi Knight etc on the same laptop makes me very happy. And it beats the hell out of dual-booting.
So this is great for OS X. And great for Linux too I guess. Yay, everyone wins!
Uh... try "console" as the login name. (Score:2, Informative)
Moshe Bar has no credibility in my book (Score:2, Interesting)
Still the double price tag... (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple trippled Market share (Score:3, Informative)
In another MacSlash article, Why use Linux? [macslash.org] there is quite a lot of discussion about the merits of both Linux and Mac OS X.
Both make rather interesting reading!
Idiotic comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
A more legitimate comparison would be a $4000 Xserve running OS X vs. $4000 worth of Linux on x86 hardware.
But, we know what the results of that would be.
What File System, console login and more (Score:4, Interesting)
OS X FS (HFS+) is not journaled. OTH, which FS in Linux? Ext3 is journaled and not very good for large directories without htree patch. ReiserFS is really fast for small files and creating new files. XFS very fast for large files...
That's to say, the filesystem is possibly the bottleneck for those database and sandmail test. And don't forget the huge amount of apache log lines generated during the benchmarks.
OTH, why did he disable fsync in sendmail? Any doubt in filesystem/cache performance on OS X?
And.. for god sake, he didn't found how to disable the Aqua environment? And the console login whithout a password, what? One of my student found it in couple of seconds in Google.
Cony!
Apple Server Market share increases 273.8% (Score:3, Informative)
Java performance... (Score:5, Informative)
Here are my results
Yellow Dog 2.3: SciMark 2.0a
Composite Score: 139.92947174097748
FFT (1024): 123.98639890992068
SOR (100x100): 166.2888365390105
Monte Carlo : 11.87347214947242
Sparse matmult (N=1000, nz=5000): 119.76608441786847
LU (100x100): 277.7325666886154
java.vendor: IBM Corporation
java.version: 1.3.1
os.arch: ppc
os.name: Linux
os.version: 2.4.20-0.7bsmp
MacOS 10.2: SciMark 2.0a
Composite Score: 65.55278911110278
FFT (1024): 45.766180267285044
SOR (100x100): 148.7766358092264
Monte Carlo : 8.128496082717385
Sparse matmult (N=1000, nz=5000): 43.78407287809933
LU (100x100): 81.30856051818576
java.vendor: Apple Computer, Inc.
java.version: 1.3.1
os.arch: ppc
os.name: Mac OS X
os.version: 10.2
Machine:
processor : 0
cpu : 7455, altivec supported
clock : 999MHz
revision : 2.1 (pvr 8001 0201)
processor : 1
cpu : 7455, altivec supported
clock : 999MHz
revision : 2.1 (pvr 8001 0201)
bogomips : 999.42
total bogomips : 1998.84
machine : PowerMac3,6
motherboard : PowerMac3,6 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh
detected as : 129 (PowerMac G4 Windtunnel)
pmac flags : 00000000
L2 cache : 256K unified
memory : 256MB
pmac-generation : NewWorld
Mem: 253776
Relevance ? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is as relevant as the MIPS rating of a CPU (null, to be explicit). I'd really suggest them to take a look at some hardware reviews from gaming sites (e.g. firingsquad [firingsquad.com]) to learn some benchmarking methodology.
And yes, pipes are much faster on Linux than on Windoze. Is it a relevant performance measurement ?
The Raven
A good test of MacOS, but not a real benchmark (Score:5, Interesting)
But this is not much of "MacOS vs. Linux" server benchmark, because Linux can run much faster on other plaforms. Why should you buy an Xserve to run Linux when you can get Intel / AMD / Transmeta systems that are faster and / or cheaper? The main (only?) reason to buy Apple hardware is the operating system. Which, judging from these reults, definitely has room for improvement.
RMN
~~~
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
OS X can be a stepping stone either to Darwin alone, BSD in general, or Unix in general (NB: That includes Linux.)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
NetInfo [apple.com].
You don't need Google cache for this one (Score:2, Interesting)
Just cut-n-paste the URL into a new browser window. They're denying any referer that matches slashdot.org (see my previous comment)
Re:Advantages??? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Advantages??? (Score:3, Funny)
There's a larger license than unlimited? [apple.com]
Re:Advantages??? (Score:2, Interesting)
also, some people think the IA32 architecture is a bit braindead.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/
Re:Advantages??? (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry, no it is not.
The XServe charges Hardware SCSI RAID prices and gives you software IDE RAID.
Re:Advantages??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Advantages??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Xinet Benchmark [xinet.com]
I admit I'm a tad skeptical of the relevance of this benchmark, but it does seem that Apple has a nice system. I suspect you could roll your own better with OpenBSD or Linux and a nice AMD multiprocessor system. That's just me though. And realistically a lot of businesses DON'T want such systems. They want a "come as it is" system. Further a lot of people don't want all the messing around that you have to do with most Linux of BSD distributions. Apple has put a very nice interface on their server. Yet you have the added benefit of being able to drop to Unix when necessary.
Apple's big problem is still the chipset used with the G4's. Given that, despite many of the nice features, unless you are primarily serving other Macs, I don't think XServe is a good choice. If you have people with Unix backgrounds then I think FreeBSD or OpenBSD is better. And for many ASP systems Sun is the clear winner. However keep watch on Apple if IBM manages to restore hardware parity for Apple. I think that as a server OSX will mature quickly.
Re:Advantages??? (Score:2)
Re:server == remote GUI (Score:3, Informative)
Three words. Apple Remote Desktop [apple.com].