[yellowdog-announce] "YDL simply wipes the floor with Mac OS X"

[yellowdog-announce at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

AnandTech:
"No More Apple Mysteries, Part Two"
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520

"While the G5 is not the best integer processing unit out there, it is not the 
one to blame for the poor performance that we experienced in our first tests. 
Running Yellow Dog Linux, the Dual G5 was capable of performing similar to a 
3 GHz Xeon ... YDL simply wipes the floor with Mac OS X: 411 versus 113 
queries per second. It gets worse at 10 concurrent users: 443 queries per 
second on Linux versus 62 on Mac Os X."

             -------------------------

As a follow-up to AnandTech's performance tests of the G5 running OSX against 
x86/ia64 hardware running Linux in June of this year 
(http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436), this article makes it 
clear that not only does Yellow Dog Linux out-perform OSX in the server 
benchmarks conducted, but causes one to question why Apple now claims Intel 
is faster than IBM's 970.

This technical document is a must read for anyone considering the performance 
of Linux on Power for server applications. Some excerpts are as follow:

"... now that Apple has announced clearly that the next generation of the 
Apple machines will be based on Intel ... the G5 is not the reason why we saw 
terrible, slow performance. In fact, we found that the IBM PowerPC 970FX has 
a few compelling advantages."

"It is again ironic that the Power 970MP is far more advanced than the current 
Intel Dual-cores when it comes to power management."

"... we found a 2.5 GHz G5 to perform more or less like a Pentium 4 3 - 3.2 
GHz in integer tasks. So, a 2 GHz G5 is probably around the speed of a 2.6 
GHz Pentium 4."

"... Apachebench on Mac OS X gets in trouble again ... On the other hand, YDL 
and the Xeon platform are roughly 3X as fast with version 2.0."


"The reason we chose Yellow dog is that Terra Soft, the company behind this 
Linux version, optimises only for the G5. So, Yellow dog is by far the most 
PowerPC optimized Linux distribution out there."

"The difference between the PowerMac running Linux and Mac OS X Server is 
absolutely striking. Mac OS X server shows better performance going from one 
to a second connection (and thus thread) because the second CPU steps in and 
helps carry the load. After that, however, performance completely collapses 
and stabilizes at around 50 queries per second."

"It is clear that if you plan to run MySQL on Apple hardware, it is better to 
install YDL Linux than to use OS X. If you need excellent read performance, 
the maximum performance of your server will be up to 8 times better. If your 
server is only going to serve a limited number of users, YDL Linux will allow 
you to run with a less expensive system."

"Now that the open source community finally has a decent compiler for the 
Apple platform, Apple management decides to step over to another 
architecture. Ironically, right now, the Intel architecture needs a 
super-optimized compiler (Intel's own) to reach the FP performance that the 
G5 now reaches with a very popular but far less aggressive compiler (gcc)."