Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 Benchmarks

[reavertm]

I'm going to test SQLite benchmark on my gentoo. This terribly poor SQLite performance in Ubuntu is shocking, something must be broken - I don't believe ext3 is that slow (I'm using reiserfs so I can't really judge though).

Edit:
sqlite benchmark results on P4 640 Prescott 3.2GHz (HT) on WDC 250GB/reiserfs (with KDE4-live with compositing and some other apps running but rather being idle)
- nearly 68s (12500 inserts)
still slower than Mac OS X, it must be FULL_SYNC related as someone stated before.

[Kano]

ext3 is much slower with small files, you can gain more than 5% when you compile a kernel on reiserfs.

[shredwheat]

Thanks for these comparisons, really interesting to see. I'd love to see more real world timing comparisons also. Main things I'm thinking about are.

1. Boot speed
2. Launch Firefox from cold boot
3. Power consumption (active and idle)
4. Battery life
5. Finder vs. Nautilus for large directories and operations

[Thetargos]

I'm disappointed for linux
still, Ubuntu is one of the slower linux distro's.

I wish there was hype behind some of these benchmarks, like there is on Acid tests for web rendering engines, or javascript stuff.
If there was such hype, I could see some linux people improving these a lot.

I agree with the post about lag since the 2.6.22 kernel in gutsy. I think it had to do with the scheduler. not convinced the CFS is completely fair

When i copy big files between HDs, my PC becomes unusable (quad core 4GB ram) seriously, I see no need for this.

Something must be really, really bad for IO operations in Ubuntu, then... I just bought a new HDD and moved around about 300Gb worth of data, from various sources to various destinations, some times simultaneously. And on my Fedora 8 x86_64 2.6.26.5 the system was just as snappy as always, while these moves were being done (and I use EXT3 as filesystem, mind you) I was doing some other stuff like reading e-mail, browsing the web and using OOo (until I had to move my /home data, which meant I didn't want to disturb the process by adding cache files to FF, new mails to TB, etc).

I don't mean this to be Ubuntu bashing or "mine is better than yours" kind of comment, rather that something has gone seriously wrong somewhere... Are there any bug reports about this? Are there any kind of reports about whether this slow down is with P-ATA/S-ATA drives? Which operations are slower? what's the CPU usage of commands like cp/mv/du/etc? Maybe a regression in a patch from Ubuntu to libata?

[kraftman]

I'd love to see benchmarks of other distros (Arch Linux, Gentoo), because it looks like there's something really bad in the newest Ubuntu. It's strange, but Intrepid seems to be faster than previous versions, so the problem may be in something else. And I'd love to see benchmarks using NVIDIA card.

[MaestroMaus]

I know, this is what mine looks like (http://www.isarapix.org/pix35/1225188868.png). My point is that if I'm going to customize it extensively I might as well use something like Arch where I get to trim away all the crap I don't need and where I am spared from the Debian package management system - Ubuntu is supposed to be a turnkey distro, and I would just love for it to be turnkey beautiful instead of turnkey 1995. Not just for myself but the image and the adoption rates that would lead to. Lots of people bought Vista purely on the eye candy. Many people who buy Macs buy them because the OS (and the hardware) is pretty. The GUI is the face of the OS, doesn't matter how solid it is, if users are met with grey task bars and some ugly brown splatter they're going to be less positive about it. I'm looking at this from a 'competing with Win/OSX' perspective which Shuttleworth claims is his goal.

I'm sorry, but I like Gnome because it's easy on the eye and has a strong layout. Furthermore, I know more people who change the vista/xp default theme to 'classic' then people who actually keep these shiny themes. Maybe the world consists of different people, who knows?

Also, if people want it shiny, they can use KDE4: Shiny by default --> problem solved.

The speed is very fast compared to XP/Vista and I have faith in the teams working on the kernel/distro's.

[d2kx]

...those benchmarks against MS Vista SP1 & OpenSolaris 2008.11

[MaestroMaus]

I know, this is what mine looks like (http://www.isarapix.org/pix35/1225188868.png). My point is that if I'm going to customize it extensively I might as well use something like Arch where I get to trim away all the crap I don't need and where I am spared from the Debian package management system - Ubuntu is supposed to be a turnkey distro, and I would just love for it to be turnkey beautiful instead of turnkey 1995. Not just for myself but the image and the adoption rates that would lead to. Lots of people bought Vista purely on the eye candy. Many people who buy Macs buy them because the OS (and the hardware) is pretty. The GUI is the face of the OS, doesn't matter how solid it is, if users are met with grey task bars and some ugly brown splatter they're going to be less positive about it. I'm looking at this from a 'competing with Win/OSX' perspective which Shuttleworth claims is his goal.

What's wrong with the Debian package manager btw?
I found it to be one of the main reasons to switch to Ubuntu really.

[Prosthetic Head]

Just one point and I don't know how important it is...
OS-X and the mac-mini are spescifically designed for each other where as ubuntu has to support as much hardware as possable out of the box. So any general OS that comes with drivers built in will have to carry a lot of 'dead weight' and avoid over optimisation, where as an OS for very few hardware platforms can be highly optimised and shed all unnecessary components.

[deanjo]

Just one point and I don't know how important it is...
OS-X and the mac-mini are spescifically designed for each other where as ubuntu has to support as much hardware as possable out of the box. So any general OS that comes with drivers built in will have to carry a lot of 'dead weight' and avoid over optimisation, where as an OS for very few hardware platforms can be highly optimised and shed all unnecessary components.

With the modular nature of linux this is of no concern. It loads what it needs to support the hardware found.