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 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

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.

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

For things like compilations, there's a bunch of file opens, caching the compiler and loader, gobs of Mallocs, and so forth that probably intersect the OS. Then there's the driver and video layer tests that look at frames per second. Leopard had 2 to 4 times faster frames per second. then there's the supporting distro services. Tests of My SQL were 4 times faster on the mac. And then there's things like the optimzation of VMs like JAVA where again Leopard excels. THese are clearly optimization problem and can be improved. the purpose of comparing it against a mac is not simply to say "oh yeah mac is faster than unbuntu", but rather to give a bench that shows how much room for optimization ubuntu has. Conclusion is that in almost every aspect Ubuntu is severely unotimized. Since older Linux seemed to be more optimized it suggests that feature bloat is probably either screwing up the design of linux or no one is paying attention to optimizing those features.

Re:

Since older Linux seemed to be more optimized

Based on what, exactly?

Oh, yeah, nothing but your own bias that Linux is experiencing "feature bloat".

Re:I don't get it really

Yeah, I forgot to mention that 8 upgrades cost me nothing but time. One thing that I wish Canonical would do is to set up a donation fund where I could donate say $50 per install and know that all the apps that come with Ubuntu would get a reasonably fair share of that money. Is anyone at Canonical listening?

AS it is now, I have to donate separately to those projects which I feel that I use enough to donate to. Trouble is that some projects which I do use are not readily recognizable as such. The Samba project is one such case. Ubuntu and others more-or-less hide its use from the user so they would be unaware that they are using it. I think this would go a long way toward helping various projects. Even if all Samba got from my $50 was $0.75. That is still a donation. In my case it would be eight times that. Yes, I do contribute to F/OSS projects, EFF, and several other groups who have my best interests at heart... well, our interests coincide.

Another thing that Canonical could do, short of setting up such a fund, is write a small app that lists the apps being used on any installation and allow the user to save the list to disk which would include the designated donation web page for that project. That's not quite as good as a donation fund, but would still help the smaller projects by announcing their use and value.

I like a good value as much as the next guy, and there is something satisfying about paying a very fair price for someone's work when it is valuable to yourself. I just wish it was easier to do.

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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]?

More of a summary

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

Summary

... for those that can't be bothered to read this lengthy yet information sparse piece.

1. MacOS X is faster in graphics intensive benchmarks.
2. The other benchmarks are fairly even with Ubuntu coming out on top more often than OS X (one notable exception is SQLite).

This is hardly anything new. OS X has a well optimised graphics system with good drivers for the intel chips (which up until now was used in both Macbooks and Mac Minis).

Also SQLite is AFAIK integral to many features of OS X, and for this reason it makes sense for Apple to have optimised for it.

Overall the benchmarks suggests that Linux (not just Ubuntu) needs some work on the graphics system and the Intel drivers. What a shock.

Re:

2. The other benchmarks are fairly even with Ubuntu coming out on top more often than OS X (one notable exception is SQLite).

Ah, very interesting. Firefox 3 doesn't work in networked OSX environments because the Mozilla devs don't want to turn on a SQLite feature to make it compatible with AFP for performance reasons. Seems like some testing is in order.

Re:Summary

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?

SQLite inserts?

What's up with the SQLite inserts? Is EXT3 really that bad? I would be interested in seeing PostgreSQL benchmarks.

Apple's Moving Aggressively On Performance

Next year, we will be seeing how much the extreme emphasis Apple is placing on performance will affect comparisons like these. Apple has figured out that since they can no longer hope to use differences in the CPU to differentiate themselves with generic Windows boxen, they will be using Microsoft's extreme backwards compatibility needs against them when it comes to fully using all the cores--whether they be in a CPU or a GPU--in a computer, and making full use of the 64-bit instruction set. GPGPU programming can give a huge performance boost to certain algorithms and the cleaner, more register rich, 64-bit instruction set is intrinsically faster in addition to allowing larger data sets.

That's why they stopped selling non 64-bit capable computers a couple years ago, and why the new MacBooks have much improved integrated graphics. That's why they are moving their developers to include 64-bit compiles as part of newly shipped universal binaries. Next year is when all this latent potential gets switched on.

Linux has the opportunity to do the same; perhaps more opportunity as it has less of a legacy binary issue, although Linux has to deal with a multitude of graphics chips, Apple only has to optimize for a handful.

Re:Apple's Moving Aggressively On Performance

Leopard has already improved performance in a lot of areas. In particular, mmap performance no longer sucks. I had an interesting experience where I wrote two back ends for some of my code, one with aio and one with mmap. On FreeBSD they were within 5% of each other. On OS X 10.4, the mmap one was an order of magnitude slower (and aio ran slower on the OS X machine, but that's not a very fair test - the OS X machine had a faster CPU but a slower disk). I extended this pathological case to a simple program which mmap'd a 2GB file and then touched one byte in every page in turn, 200 times. On 10.4, this completely killed the machine until it finished running, and didn't finish when I left it overnight. On 10.5, the machine stayed responsive (some slowdown, but not much), and finished in about an hour. Now that it's certified as fully complying with SUS'03, Darwin is a pretty nice OS, although too many parts of it (audio subsystem, for example) are closed for it to really be useful without OS X.

Re:Apple's Moving Aggressively On Performance

So many people are going to call BS on this, but...

I was in the mac store the other day, and I swear I could tell the difference between the new Mac books with the NVIDIA chips and the ones without. From just looking at the scaling performance of the doc as you mouse over it, it looked so much more solid.

I tend to be very sensitive to visual artifacts. I hated my MythTV box because of the tearing (memory bus issue) and blocking on Comcast (so glad I now have FIOS, which still blocks, but only for static or oceanscapes).

Things like a dock where it feels "solid" (better servicing of repaints) just give a better impression of stability and performance, even if its just a simple scale operation. Having no flicker in position or delay in rendering make an impression on people who may not even be aware of what they are seeing.

Ubuntu fast enough for me

I have not noticed performance problems from Ubuntu. Sometimes I think these small differences are pretty much unnoticeable to the common user. I would say that while Linux always seems fast and snappy to me, its Windows which has a truly noticeable sluggish feel.

I certainly do not think it is a good trade off in an OS to sacrifice features for an increase in speed which really is not noticeable. In most cases this is not necessary as many parts of a system can be made optional. The schedular and some core kernel systems effect the speed of the whole system, but most other components are optional, like X, like drivers, like Gnome, and so on.

Which also is the nice thing about X: the designers of X decided not to try to build in a bunch of heavy user interface junk into the X server, ironically which many people criticise. Excluding memory leaks in some drivers not related to X itself, the X protocol and server system is actually very efficient by todays standards and does not use much memory. Most memory usage is in caching and in bad drivers full of crappy code. Therefore you can run our own window manager without carrying a bunch of stuff you wont use. But the eye candy is there if you want it. People should choose how many features and memory or how little they wish to use.

Re:We musn't fight each other...

Surely we should be united against the common enemy.

It's not fight, it's play. And when one system wins in terms of speed or usability, both systems win in terms of a weaker common enemy.

Re:We musn't fight each other...

This thread will end up getting moderated flame-bait, but what would that common enemy be? Personally I think Windows is rather ok now, Windows 7 will probably be even better, who knows, maybe even better than snow leopard.

The only thing I see as an enemy is ideas which are pushed down my throat no matter what if I want them or not. I want to use my data and my applications in the way I feel like, not be forced to a single method just because someone else thought it was the best one. But that is true for all operating systems and no special "enemy."

I like many things in OS X and in applications for it because it makes sense and makes using the computer more comfortable, I don't like some other things because they don't let me do the things I want to do.

The huge amount of applications for Windows makes it rather likely that you can find one which fits your purpose, some for the window managers and such in the free unix-like oses.

Re:

Apple and MS are two sides of the same coin.

Re:Ubuntu -- Obama Linux Distro

It came from nothing to something in a very short period of time.

I wouldn't call Debian "nothing".

Re:

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. :-)

Re:

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:

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:Why is Fruit of the Loom so popular?

Distros are like underwear

Gentoo has the nastiest skid marks.

Re:

Well .... you _were_ pretty fast to stop reading the article ;)

But apart from that, what's wrong with 7zip?

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

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.

Re:Ubuntu if you want to

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.