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

On Fri, 9 Nov 2007, Mark Niedzielski wrote:

> The Macs perform common and complex Postgres operations in about half 
> the time of our unloaded production hardware.

Are they write intensive?  If so, it may be possible that the Macs are 
buffering disk writes while production server isn't.  It's often the case 
that desktop systems will cheat at writes while servers don't.

> Is there a trick to making AMDs perform?

One problem you can run into is that the default configuration on some 
Linux+AMD systems will include aggressive power management that throttles 
the CPU clock down.  Take a look at /proc/cpuinfo on your server and see 
what the "cpu MHz" reads; if it's 1000.00 or otherwise doesn't match what 
you expect, you may need to turn off or otherwise tune power management to 
keep the system running at full speed.  My home AMD dual-core system was 
positively sluggish until I fixed that.

> Does Linux suck compared to BSD?

Not the Mac OS BSD.  Last time I looked into this OS X was still 
dramatically slower than Linux on things like process creation.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD