Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.6 Benchmarks

Another area where Ubuntu performed horribly compared to Mac OS X was with Crafty. Crafty is an open-source chess program/engine that is very well known and is quite advanced. It took Mac OS X just 114 seconds to run the Crafty benchmark while 693 seconds were needed on the newest Ubuntu release. Ubuntu was more than six times slower with the Crafty test profile!

Next we turned to another new Phoronix Test Suite profile: the Threaded I/O Tester (available by the name tiobench in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0). When measuring the latency on the 64MB write performance with four active threads, Mac OS X 10.5.6 had an average latency of 411 microseconds while Ubuntu 9.04 was more responsive with just 360 microseconds.

When switching the thread count from 4 to 32 and sticking with the 64MB writes, Ubuntu 9.04 was less responsive with a time of 4684 microseconds while Mac OS X 10.5.6 was at 3848 microseconds.