OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs. Fedora 23 Linux Performance

With the PostMark disk benchmark, Fedora 23 was multiple times faster than OS X El Capitan. We've seen this before on past OS X vs. Linux comparisons and likely comes down to this test doing better with the EXT4 file-system than the aging Journaled HFS+ file-system used by OS X.

When turning to the PostgreSQL server, however, OS X was twice as fast as Fedora 23. There were some slight differences in the compiler flags between OS X and Fedora 23 as shipped by upstream, but for reasons yet to be explored, OS X was performing significantly better for this test profile.

Sadly many of our longtime OS X graphics/game benchmarks didn't want to run on OS X 10.11 with their current builds. But for Nexuiz it did run fine on both operating systems. This OpenGL game was running much faster with Fedora 23 and its Linux 4.2 + Mesa 11 open-source graphics stack than the Intel OS X OpenGL driver.