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

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:

> On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:01:06 -0700
> Scott Ribe <scott_ribe(at)killerbytes(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> > In general, you can expect any Unix based OS, which includes MacOS
>> > X, to perform noticeably better than Windows for PostgreSQL.
>>
>> Is that really true of BSD UNIXen??? I've certainly heard it's true of
>> Linux. But with BSD you have the "kernel funnel" which can severely
>> limit multitasking, regardless of whether threads or processes were
>> used. Apple has been working toward finer-grained locking precisely
>> because that was a serious bottleneck which limited OS X server
>> performance.
>>
>> Or have I misunderstood and this was only the design of one particular
>> flavor of BSD, not BSDen in general?

That was true of the traditional BSD 4.3 and 4.4 design. However when people
refer to "BSD" these days they're referring to one of the major derivatives
which have all undergone extensive further development. FreeBSD has crowed a
lot about their finer-grained kernel locks too for example. Other variants of
BSD tend to focus on other areas (like portability for example) so they may
not be as far ahead but they've still undoubtedly made significant progress
compared to 1993.

> Not much of a kernel guy here but my understanding is that MacOSX is
> basically NeXT version 10, which means... Mach... which is entirely
> different than say FreeBSD at the kernel level.

I think (but I'm not sure) that the kernel in OSX comes from BSD. What they
took from NeXT was the GUI design and object oriented application framework
stuff. Basically all the stuff that Unix programmers still haven't quite
figured out what it's good for.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
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