24 February 2006

MacBook Pro vs Dell Pentium M w/ Ubuntu Linux


Matt Raible documents his experience with unwrapping his new Duo Core MacBook Pro.

For grins, I decided to compare his performance measurements with my 10-month old Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. Obviously this test is far from scientific. Anyway, here are my specs:

Dell Inspiron 9300
Intel Pentium M @ 2Ghz
2Gb RAM
60gb 7200 RPM HDD
Ubuntu Linux 5.10 w/ Kernel 2.6.12-10-686

This laptop cost less than $3K in April 2005. Here is the precise cpuinfo specs:
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz
stepping : 8

And here are my results. Note: I ran each test 4 times.

ant clean package-web
16 seconds
14 seconds
13 seconds
13 seconds

ant setup test-all
1 minute 25 seconds
1 minute 21 seconds
1 minute 23 seconds
1 minute 23 seconds

His results on the new MacBook Pro were 12 seconds for the first test and 1 minute 28 seconds for the second test.

Conclusion? Its all about the file-system and cacheing. Running OS X or Linux greater improves file IO, 2 Gb RAM allows the OS to aggressively cache disk access and a 7200 RPM HDD offers substantial performance improvements when it does have to hit the disk.

In my opinion CPU and clock speed matters the least.

Here is how I reproduced his tests:
Prerequsite:
* Mysql installed and running;
* CATALINA_HOME environment variable pointing to Tomcat 5.5 installation

cvs -d :pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs login
cvs -d :pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs checkout appfuse
cd appfuse
ant clean package-web
ant clean package-web
ant clean package-web
ant clean package-web
ant setup test-all
ant setup test-all
ant setup test-all
ant setup test-all

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