Can Ubuntu 9.10 Outperform Mac OS X 10.6?

Mac OS X 10.6.0 with its Xcode-provided GCC compiler was much faster than Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10 at compiling Apache. In fact, Snow Leopard was over twice as fast as Ubuntu. Ubuntu 9.10 with GCC 4.4 was actually slower at building Apache than GCC 4.3 in Ubuntu 9.04.

Snow Leopard was faster at building Apache, but not at PHP. Building PHP under Snow Leopard took 141 seconds on the Mac Mini compared to 95 seconds for Ubuntu 9.10.

Ubuntu 9.04 outperformed Mac OS X 10.6.0 when it came to the MIPS count for the 7-Zip compression performance, but there was a 21% drop in performance under Ubuntu 9.10.