Looking at platforms objectively (was Re: [X4U] Re: Lack of sleep)

[Zane H. Healy]

At 8:36 AM -0500 9/2/05, Michael Winter wrote:
>On Sep 1, 2005, at 10:44 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
>>Performance
>>WinXP wins over Mac OS X, BUT looses to just about anything else 
>>besides Linux.
>
>I just like to point out one often overlooked factor in performance. 
>In most cases the performance bottleneck isn't CPU speed, it isn't 
>the OS, it isn't hard disk speed, it isn't this bus or that, its the 
>operator. It doesn't matter if the fast system can do the operation 
>in 100 ms vs. 200 for the slow system, if it takes 5 seconds of 
>operator work to initiate it on the fast system, but only 3 on the 
>slow system.
>
>So yes, Mac OS X may take a "performance" hit, but its an engineered 
>trade-off to increase the performance of the user. That's an 
>engineering factor that's rarely taken into account when people do 
>their "performance" comparisons.

Personally from where I'm sitting there is a serious performance issue for
Mac OS X.  Yes, I can solve some of those issues by adding more RAM, 
however, I'm sitting at 1.5GB of RAM right now.  For what I'm doing I 
shouldn't need it, the performance problems I see are largely due to 
how they've chosen to use RAM.

This isn't to say that a RAM starved Windows systems doesn't have 
problems, I've seen Windows 2003 Enterprise servers that were so 
starved for RAM and virtual memory performance was so bad that they 
had to be rebooted.  This was a system planning issue though rather 
than a problem with Windows.  The application being run requires a 
LOT more RAM than the systems have for the amount of work being done. 
Moving to faster disks did largely solve this problem (yes, that is 
almost as backwards as it sounds).

			Zane


-- 
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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
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