So I’m now the proud owner of a tricked-out 2.8GHz MBP.

Naturally I’ve been tinkering with it already (only had it for 2 days). I’ve disabled swapfile encryption, for instance, and I think it makes it have teh snappy.

I compiled postmark for it with -O3 -m64 and ran the usual. Before doing so though I did disable the Spotlight indexer like this:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

PostMark v1.5 : 3/27/01
pm>set number 10000
pm>set transactions 20000
pm>set subdirectories 5
pm>set size 500 100000
pm>set read 4096
pm>set write 4096
pm>run

Time:
273 seconds total
256 seconds of transactions (78 per second)

Files:
20092 created (73 per second)
Creation alone: 10000 files (833 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 10092 files (39 per second)
9935 read (38 per second)
10064 appended (39 per second)
20092 deleted (73 per second)
Deletion alone: 10184 files (2036 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 9908 files (38 per second)

Data:
548.25 megabytes read (2.01 megabytes per second)
1158.00 megabytes written (4.24 megabytes per second)

I then enabled spotlight and re-ran the benchmark:

Time:
483 seconds total
468 seconds of transactions (42 per second)

Files:
20092 created (41 per second)
Creation alone: 10000 files (909 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 10092 files (21 per second)
9935 read (21 per second)
10064 appended (21 per second)
20092 deleted (41 per second)
Deletion alone: 10184 files (2546 per second)
Mixed with transactions: 9908 files (21 per second)

Data:
548.25 megabytes read (1.14 megabytes per second)
1158.00 megabytes written (2.40 megabytes per second)

Obviously spotlight is very aggressive in its indexing and tries to do it ASAP – you lose half your performance when doing metadata-intensive processing. The results though, while sucky for the specs of the box, are far, far removed (and much better than) what an old colleague got on his beastie: http://recoverymonkey.net/wordpress/?p=62 – granted, my box is faster but it shouldn’t be THAT much faster.

I   urge my newfound Mac brethren to help out in determining the cause.

More benchmarks to follow.

D