tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8885167082319491081.post-81899094559003408132008-04-28T10:02:00.006-04:002008-04-28T10:40:51.703-04:002008-04-28T10:40:51.703-04:00<p> That little article on Battle of Mac Virtualization Products caused quite a stir with Parallels and another web publisher contacting me. I'll follow up with them and report back but in the meantime check this out. </p> <p>I mentioned last time that on Parallels, the linux filesystem (ext3) seemed quite a bit faster than <i>the native filesystem</i>. They are many ways this could happen and honestly I have neither time not expertise to learn about the finer details of HFS3 vs. ext3. Filesystems are messy. </p> <p>Not that CPU benchmarks are much better, but I do have a silly python benchmark that tests raw performance. I stole the idea from <a href="http://furryland.org/~mikec/bench/">http://furryland.org/~mikec/bench/</a>. I use it mostly to see if compiler flags make any difference when compiling python from source, or what the performance of a pre-made version of python is. The code is at the end. </p> <h3>Apple OS X 10.5</h3> <pre> $ ./benchmark.py test_hash: 2.833932 test_list: 3.647719 </pre> <h3> Ubuntu 8.0.4 Server 64-Bit in VMWare Fusion</h3> <pre> $benchmark.py test_hash: 1.697652 test_list: 2.255775 </pre> <p>Uhhhh, say what? VMWare is 33%+ faster than native? Remember this is running the same code, on the <i>same machine</i>. I have no idea if Ubuntu being 64-bit (vs. 32) makes any difference. This code doesn't do very much, so I suspect that the Linux memory allocators must be <i>quite</i> a bit better than Mac OS X. </p> <p>This is of course a bit synthetic, and I can find other examples of the virtualized linux being a lot slower than native mac, however, it is interesting.</p> <p>Comments most welcome.</p> <hr /> <h3>The Lame Test</h3> <pre> from timeit import Timer test_hash = """ for i in xrange(100): x={} for j in xrange(1000): x[j]=i x[j] """ test_list = """ v=['a','b','c','d','e','f','g'] for j in xrange(1000): v.append(j) v[j] """ t = Timer(stmt=test_hash) print "test_hash: %f" % t.timeit(100) t = Timer(stmt=test_list) print "test_list: %f" % t.timeit(10000) </pre>nickghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04659163622120256748noreply@blogger.com1