tech industry
06/15/2005, 9:50am, EDT
Wednesday, June 15th
Review: Mac OS X limits server performance
AnandTech has posted a lengthy review of the Power Mac G5, Xserve G5, and Mac OS X. The report finds that Mac OS X on the PowerPC G5 is a viable workstation platform. However, the article concludes that Mac OS X is lacking as a server platform. Lmbench was used to test MySQL performance and measure the bottlenecks at the Unix operating system and CPU level. "Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads."
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And the slowness is also not due the fact that they use Mach, because they are not using it like a traditional microkernel (where every service runs in a separate memory space), but everything runs in one single address space (even the Mach and BSD personalities run in the same address space).
Some more detailed comments can be found at http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/?p=17
Intelligently designed server applications run very well on Mac OS X. Badly designed ones... don't.
What possible brain-deficiency related thing made them think that their little test case even made sense ? And frankly, I STILL question what even GAVE THEM the idea that they were prepared for this ? Has Anandtech EVER done any sort of review of anything else Mac related ( I don't think so, but I could be wrong on that ) ?
But I digress, I think they need to go back to school, and rethink their approach. Come back to us after you've actually thought the assignment through boys.
That said, he's only a kid. And although extremely bright, he's not the last word in computing (although treated as such by many PC folk).
But the only people that can address it is the MySQL and Apache developers.