Richard,
Just so you're aware you're going to run into serious performance limitations using OS X.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520&p=5
In short, Linux on the same hardware will perform ~8x faster!!!
I only experienced about 2x improvement in speed (+ greatly reduced load) using the APC
PHP accelerator so you'd be much better off spending your time upgrading the OS (if
possible) than installing an accelerator if you're after speed.
Andy
Just so you're aware you're going to run into serious performance limitations using OS X.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520&p=5
In short, Linux on the same hardware will perform ~8x faster!!!
I only experienced about 2x improvement in speed (+ greatly reduced load) using the APC
PHP accelerator so you'd be much better off spending your time upgrading the OS (if
possible) than installing an accelerator if you're after speed.
Andy
Andy,
That data is from 2005, on the PPC chip - the machine I'm running is an XServe with dual 2.8 GHz quad core Intel Xeon processors with OS 10.5 Server which includes 64 bit MySQL. MySQL performance nearly doubled on OS X when Apple moved to Intel, according to Apple's XServe product manager. Actually, here's exactly what he said on this topic:
'Most of the information that was posted on MySQL performance on Mac OS X (Tiger) is quite stale and based on some fundamentally flawed tests. After much investigation the big factor we found in MySQL performance on OS X was in fact due to a configuration file that was incredible conservative in its memory and resource allocation. This was the default file used in our installation of MySQL built-in to Tiger. (This was fixed in 10.4.7 and is documented in kbase 303225). [[ http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303225 ]http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303225]
On top of that MySQL performance nearly doubled when we went to Intel. The few performance issues I've read about online were due to Intel customers running PPC binaries thru Rosetta!
I'm not aware of any specific benchmarking of MySQL on Leopard but I'm pretty confident that MySQL performance will be very respectable. Memory and fast hard drives (15K SAS!) *always* help! '
Now, granted, that's what Apple is going to say. But I'm willing to give it a shot for one simple reason - it was the hardware I was given and I don't have the option right now of using different hardware. I looked into running Linux on it, but the consensus option out there was that there's no real reliable fantastic distro for the new XServe. So for now, it's OS 10.5 Server on an XServe. But I'm still curious about PHP Acceleration...
That data is from 2005, on the PPC chip - the machine I'm running is an XServe with dual 2.8 GHz quad core Intel Xeon processors with OS 10.5 Server which includes 64 bit MySQL. MySQL performance nearly doubled on OS X when Apple moved to Intel, according to Apple's XServe product manager. Actually, here's exactly what he said on this topic:
'Most of the information that was posted on MySQL performance on Mac OS X (Tiger) is quite stale and based on some fundamentally flawed tests. After much investigation the big factor we found in MySQL performance on OS X was in fact due to a configuration file that was incredible conservative in its memory and resource allocation. This was the default file used in our installation of MySQL built-in to Tiger. (This was fixed in 10.4.7 and is documented in kbase 303225). [[ http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303225 ]http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303225]
On top of that MySQL performance nearly doubled when we went to Intel. The few performance issues I've read about online were due to Intel customers running PPC binaries thru Rosetta!
I'm not aware of any specific benchmarking of MySQL on Leopard but I'm pretty confident that MySQL performance will be very respectable. Memory and fast hard drives (15K SAS!) *always* help! '
Now, granted, that's what Apple is going to say. But I'm willing to give it a shot for one simple reason - it was the hardware I was given and I don't have the option right now of using different hardware. I looked into running Linux on it, but the consensus option out there was that there's no real reliable fantastic distro for the new XServe. So for now, it's OS 10.5 Server on an XServe. But I'm still curious about PHP Acceleration...
Richard
I'd be very interested to hear how you are getting on with Moodle and OSX 10.5. there was a lot of stuff written about that Anadtech article at the time but nothing since the change to Intel so I wondered whether the Moodle performance was noticeably improved?
Simon
I'd be very interested to hear how you are getting on with Moodle and OSX 10.5. there was a lot of stuff written about that Anadtech article at the time but nothing since the change to Intel so I wondered whether the Moodle performance was noticeably improved?
Simon
I run moodle on a 10.4.11 xserve and it is fantastically fast and reliable with 1200 users and many, many courses. Contact me directly for details. dtrockman@blakeschool.org
BUMP!
No one else out there running 10.5 server and thinking about php acceleration? I'm mostly concerned about "chat."
No one else out there running 10.5 server and thinking about php acceleration? I'm mostly concerned about "chat."
I'm using APC on server 10.5.4, installed it last term but as we are on summer break now I haven't been able to properly assess it yet. As we are new to Moodle September will show if there are any advantages or problems!
Thanks, Simon! I'll check it out on our test box. Let us know how things go!