Mac OS X 10.6 Brings Serious Performance Gains

For anyone interested in computational biology, our MAFFT test profile performs an alignment of 100 pyruvate decarboxylase sequences. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was slightly faster in this very heavily CPU-based benchmark.

Looking at the database performance under Mac OS X 10.6, we fired up PostgreSQL. The performance here was virtually unchanged.

Sudokut is a Sudoku game solver we use as one of the aspects for looking at the CPU performance. Sudokut is written in Tcl and under Snow Leopard it actually regressed substantially. The time it took to complete the solving tasks went from 61 seconds to 81 seconds. This is one of the few tests where using Mac OS X 10.6.0 will lead to performance degradation, but perhaps will be cured in Mac OS X 10.6.1 or another point release.