DaveNet: Sunday, October 19, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Frontier/Win32 Performance

I started using the Win32 version of Frontier today.

It's building websites. Ye-hi!

So of course the first thing I wanted to do is see how it performs relative to the Mac software.

Two systems

The Mac is a 9500/120 running System 7.5.5. I'm running a bunch of apps on this system, but not an unusual configuration for me in website work. Eudora, MORE, MSIE 3.0.1, Simpletext, Frontier.

The PC is a fast Pentium machine from Dell. What megahertz? I don't know. It's running Windows NT 4.0 and MSIE 4.0, nothing else.

Page rendering test

First I just did a horserace type test simultaneously on Mac and Windows.

Put the cursor on user.websites.davenet.["97"].["01"].ANewGroove.

Choose Release Table from the Web menu.

(There are 15 items in the table.)

Click on OK on both machines.

The PC finished rendering all 15 pages before the Mac version rendered the second page.

Elapsed time on the PC: 20 seconds.

Wow!

suites.samples.performance

I ran unmodified versions of the UserTalk scripts in suites.samples.performance.

The results showed that the Windows version of Frontier runs faster, but not hugely faster. It's interesting, because it suggests that the huge performance boost in rendering pages comes from somewhere else. A better threading model on Windows NT? Faster file system? Smaller root file?

	Mac	Win
Frontier Built-in	3	1
Subroutine Call	35	18
Integer Arithmetic	10	8
File System Test	136	36

Units are measured in sixtieths of a second.

Ben Kimball

A theory from ben@starmax.net:

This is a guess, but I'd bet the performance comes from a faster disk I/O subsystem. In my experience the hard disk has always been the Achilles' heel of Mac machines. Boosting disk cache can help a little (some people say a lot, but I haven't seen it), but replace your internal SCSI disk in your 9500 with a fast/wide SCSI-3 drive and a PCI SCSI accelerator card (like the ATTO ExpressPCI) and I'd bet your scores would jump dramatically.

I've never understood why Apple doesn't put fast disks in their machines, particularly if they're after the content creation market. Power Computing understood: all of their high-end boxes had fast disks, and some even had internal RAIDs. Motorola finally got it, too, just before they got kicked out of the market.