At 2:21 PM -0400 6/29/05, Joshua Coombs wrote:
You're still missing the point, Chris. OS X is not inefficient -
it is just doing a lot.
OS X is inefficent, scarily so, just in areas most aren't used to
trying to directly benchmark. The majority of the OS X code is
actually fairly tight and clean, the bottleneck I'm refering to
stems from the bodging of BSD ontop of Mach. The way Apple went
about this results in a kernel that blocks FAR more than it needs to.
Now, Apple isn't the only one with this problem, the FreeBSD 5.x
tree's primary goal is to get rid of the BGL (Big Giant Lock)
present within the FreeBSD kernel, other OSs suffer from it to some
degree or annother. The difference is the extra layer the Mach
interface imposes, cutting Apple's threading down to one tenth the
speed of other os's on the same hardware.
<snip>
Other Mach OSs with BSD or Linux or other api's bolted ontop
(MKlinux) have shown similar performance problems. Apple is taking
steps to correct it, Tiger breaks the BGL up into two big locks, but
they need to get further before you really start to see OS X scream.
Hmmm. Just out of curiosity... Does this Big Giant Lock (or Two Big
Locks as the case may be for 10.4) just affect GUI type applications,
or does it affect stuff like Apache running as a daemon? Or does it
depend upon how the particular application was written - ie, are some
apps written at a level before the BGL/TBL takes effect?
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