Ubuntu 8.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.5 Benchmarks

An anonymous reader writes "As a sequel to their Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? Phoronix now has out an article that compares the performance of Ubuntu 8.10 to Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5. They tested both the x86 and x86_64 spins of Ubuntu and threw at both operating systems a number of graphics, disk, computational, and Java benchmarks, among others. With the Mac Mini used in some of the comparisons, 'Leopard' was faster, while in others it was a tight battle."

I don't get it really

[zappepcs]

It's a lengthy read, and there isn't much in there to say that Ubuntu has any real work to do. Seems like they were comparing two Ferrari race cars and commenting on the differences in interiors... to use a car analogy.

I've just upgraded 8 systems to 8.10 and am quite happy. I was concerned over real world issues about the upgrade from early reports. The old IBM T22 with 256MB RAM was my test case. Guess what? The upgrade went as fast as my Wireless G card would allow it, after a reboot, and then an update last night, it is working a bit better than with 8.04 from a layman's point of view. Yes, it can drag now and then, but is resource limited severely. After the upgrade I did not have to tweak anything, and any problems I was having prior are now fixed. I appear to have fscked up a setting on the wireless networking, but now it's all good. As far as I am concerned, with two older laptops upgraded, and 3 older desktops upgraded, all with ZERO defects, Ubuntu continues to impress me. I will continue to give out CDs free to anyone that wants to improve their computing life.

Now, if you just have to have the 'perfect' gaming machine... go ahead and worry about little things. As for the rest of the world, 8.10 is rocking awesomeness.

More of a summary

[ojintoad]

Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 "Leopard" had strong performance leads over Canonical's Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" in the OpenGL performance with the integrated Intel graphics, disk benchmarking, and SQLite database in particular. Ubuntu on the other hand was leading in the compilation and BYTE Unix Benchmark. In the audio/video encoding and PHP XML tests the margins were smaller and no definitive leader had emerged. With the Java environment, Sunflow and Bork were faster in Mac OS X, but the Intrepid Ibex in SciMark 2 attacked the Leopard. These results though were all from an Apple Mac Mini.

Also worth mentioning are the collection of posts from the last thread that convincingly argued various problems with the Phoronix Benchmarks.
Example 1 [slashdot.org]
Example 2 [slashdot.org]
Example 3 [slashdot.org]

Speed tests are good, let's make sure we're doing them right

Re:Why is Ubunto so popular?

[y86]

I've read that when things go wrong its a pig to sort out.

See any other linux distribution. I've run linux since Redhat 4.1 in 1997 and I've slutted around with slackware(which is my fav for simplicity), debian, Suse, Caldera, and many others.

I've never run into a distro that ISN'T a pig when something goes wrong except SLACKWARE. And slackware is only simple since it offers almost no package management and no autoconfiguration.

The easier it is the use, the bigger nightmare it seems to be when it breaks. See windows registry for another great analogy.

Re:Summary

[Gilmoure]

Firefox 3 doesn't work in networked OSX environments...

Firefox 3 is the default browser on Macs at my work (OS X 10.4 and 10.5) and we have about 1500 networked. How is Firefox 3 supposed to not be working?

Re:SQLite inserts?

[Zan Lynx]

I am pretty sure Apple cheats on fsync which SQLite uses a lot. To get a real fsync from OS X you have to use the special secret F_FULLFSYNC fcntl.

"Cheat" may be too strong, but Linux fsync sends a command to disk to flush all disk buffers and OS X does not.

Re:it's not simply the OS, it's the distro

[getaceres]

Based on this: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_bench_2008&num=1 [phoronix.com]

Re:Ubuntu is dog slow.

[BrokenHalo]

Want a sleek and fast linux ? Slackware's the answer.

You sound like a recent convert. :-D

I've been a huge fan of Slackware ever since it was Soft Landing Systems, but since my preferred GUI is Gnome rather than KDE, I fairly recently got tired of waiting for updates to the excellent Dropline Gnome distribution for Slackware [droplinegnome.org] while it looked as if it was going nowhere, and tried out Arch Linux [archlinux.org], and I haven't looked back.

It's optimised for 686 architectures, the package manager, like Slackware's, is nice and simple, but with much more powerful features for retrieving packages plus dependencies online and on-the-fly. And best of all, it has nice BSD-like init scripts with which any Slackware user will feel comfortable. It's less intuitive for the newbie to install than Slack, since there's a certain amount of manual editing of config scripts required, but neither is really designed for the newbie in any case...

Re:Why is Ubunto so popular?

[Culture20]

I tried to like Suse and opensuse post Novell, but the mono-based auto-update system kept hanging, and I had to write a cron job to force kill the processes and restart the auto-updates. Not to mention that SLED didn't ever get mozilla thunderbird packages because they thought evolution should be good enough for anyone. I switched to a more grown up distro after a year of trying to get Suse to work as Novell intended.

Re:I don't get it really

[Walles]

a small app that lists the apps being used on any installation and allow the user to save the list to disk

You mean like this [freshmeat.net]?

Re:Summary

[bill_mcgonigle]

Firefox 3 is the default browser on Macs at my work (OS X 10.4 and 10.5) and we have about 1500 networked. How is Firefox 3 supposed to not be working?

Do you have local home directories or are you fully networked?

Re:Summary

[Chaos Incarnate]

Firefox 3 works fine if profiles are on the local machine under OS X, but has issues if they're on a remote machine [mozilla.org].

Re:Ubuntu -- Obama Linux Distro

[swillden]

I wouldn't call Debian "nothing".

Good point, it was a slow moving ugly mess not suitable for normal users and not suitable for average users. :-)

Nonsense. Debian was and is very fast-moving. If you run sid, you get new packages before pretty much any other distro, including Gentoo. At the same time, it was and is very polished and reliable. If you run stable, you get rock-solid reliability, and everything just works.

What Ubuntu did was to take Debian as a base and build another distro that's in between stable and sid in terms of development pace (about where Debian testing sits, except that Ubuntu only updates twice a year, rather than continuously), and added some polish to make it more accessible to non-geeks.

Ubuntu is a valuable addition, but to say that it was build on a "slow-moving mess" overestimates the amount of Ubuntu's contribution to the Debian base.

Re:SQLite inserts?

[coolsnowmen]

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man2/fsync.2.html [apple.com]

You are right, and that is not what I expected.

Note that while fsync() will flush all data from the host to the drive (i.e. the "permanent storage
          device"), the drive itself may not physically write the data to the platters for quite some time and it
          may be written in an out-of-order sequence.

          Specifically, if the drive loses power or the OS crashes, the application may find that only some or
          none of their data was written. The disk drive may also re-order the data so that later writes may be
          present, while earlier writes are not.

          This is not a theoretical edge case. This scenario is easily reproduced with real world workloads and
          drive power failures.

          For applications that require tighter guarantees about the integrity of their data, Mac OS X provides
          the F_FULLFSYNC fcntl.

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

[ShieldW0lf]

Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do.

It doesn't, huh? You mean like three generations of PowerPC CPUs, a second CPU architecture (x86), all the different flavors of HDDs, DVD drives, video cards, and other installable and peripheral devices you can add third-party, and then just about every bit of hardware Apple has come out with since the G3 processor debuted?

Therefore, it can exploit the hardware better. It's the same principle that applied to game developers targeting the XBox rather than a standard PC. Standard PCs might be more powerful, but the XBox is a non-moving target, so you don't need to write to the lowest common denominator, and can exploit the particular strengths of the hardware better.

Okay. The XBox uses a motherboard. Apple has several models using a variety of motherboard and hardware dating back to who-knows-when that it has to account for. You're comparing a console's static array of hardware to an entire production line. That's hardly the same thing.

Ok, you've expressed how much more variance there is in the Apple product line compared to the XBox. Now, just for the sake of completeness, why don't you express how much more variance in the supported hardware for Ubuntu compared to Apple.

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

[ShieldW0lf]

It used to, but doesn't any more. Lack of demand. And incase you're saying that PPC support is more important than the tens of thousands of devices linux supports, think again. I've never had a hardware setup ubuntu hasn't worked with. It can be tricky at times, but my digital camera works straight away, my phone does, my MP3 player, web camera, usb headset, usb/wireless mouse, etc etc etc. The hardware support in linux absolutely vast, and support for non-peripheral hardware is going to be pretty tight. So yeah, linux supporting everything does mean lowest-common-denominator development, as the grandparent said.

It's worth mentioning that G3 support was dropped in Leopard, and that PowerPC support was dropped entirely from the developer version of Snow Leopard.

Re:Summary

[Gilmoure]

Local home for now. I see what folks are saying about FF3 and networked directories. Yeah, that'll suck unless they get it fixed.

Re:7-zip benchmark? WTF??

[Hatta]

7z is actually pretty impressive. I recently converted a bunch of ROMs from 7z to gz for use with mednafen. I don't remember exactly, but the gzipped roms were close to 50% bigger than the 7z. FWIW, 7z uses both LZMA and bzip2 compression as appropriate. The only real reason not to use it, is that you can't expect people to have 7z installed just yet. But bzip2 overcame that obstacle, and 7z should too. This comparison [reucon.com] should interest you.

It's also worth noting that the gui windows 7-zip program is the best archive manager I've ever used on that platform. Easy to use, powerful (great context menu entries), supports most existing formats, and is entirely free. There's no reason 7z shouldn't take over the world. But I guess that makes me a loudmouth advocate, huh.

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

[eggnet]

If you have to hack it to even get it to run, how is this relevant in the slightest?

Because the hack doesn't slow anything down nor would the "hack" placed in the main OS slow anything down. OSX pays the performance penalty of supporting extreme variation in hardware by having drivers and APIs that abstract functionality. The fact that there are only drivers written for hardware that Apple sells is a moot point in terms of performance penalties.

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

[nxtw]

Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do. Therefore, it can exploit the hardware better. It's the same principle that applied to game developers targeting the XBox rather than a standard PC. Standard PCs might be more powerful, but the XBox is a non-moving target, so you don't need to write to the lowest common denominator, and can exploit the particular strengths of the hardware better. So, it's unreasonable to expect an OS that is written to work on multiple platforms to compete in this fashion.

The Xbox was always sold with the same chipset. There was no need to have interchangable drivers.

OS X Intel has been sold (so far, and at least) on systems with Intel 945GM, 945PM, GM965, GMS965, PM965, 5000X, 5400 and nVidia 9400M system chipsets. That's two (plus one low-power variation) Intel mobile chipsets with Intel integrated graphics, two Intel mobile chipsets with PCI Express x16 graphics, two Intel server/workstation chipsets, and one nVidia integrated mobile chipset. It supports two generations of Intel GPUs (GMA 950 and X3100), at least three generations of GeForce GPUs (7, 8, and 9-series), and at least four generations of Radeon GPUs (X1k, HD2k, HD3k, and HD4k).
There aren't a whole lot of hardware-specific assumptions or optimizations that can be made without making things only work on on that hardware... which is why hardware-specific code is in interchangeable drivers.

Apple can't even assume that every Intel Mac has a 64-bit dual core CPU; the first Intel Macs had Core Solo or Core Duo CPUs. Apple can assume that every Intel CPU will have SSE2 and SSE3, though, so many floating-point operations are performed using SSE instructions instead of the x87 FPU. But software can be compiled to use SSE on any other operating system as well. (SSE3 is featured on nearly all Intel and CPUs.)

They could write code/compiler optimizations that result in faster execution on some CPUs, but they're already supporting the P6 microarchitecture (the original Core Duo was close in design to the Pentium M) and the Core microarchitecture, and Nehalem will be here soon.