Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion DP2 Battles Ubuntu 10.10
The latest Developer Preview 2 of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion appears to improve the read performance of the HFS+ file-system, at least for the BlogBench read workload. However, Ubuntu 10.10 on the EXT4 file-system continues to read much faster than any Mac OS X release.
The write performance in BlogBench was largely unchanged (possibly degraded a slight bit) with the latest Mac OS X 10.7 developers' build while the Ubuntu 10.10 performance remained much faster. Ubuntu 10.10 on the Linux 2.6.35 kernel with the EXT4 file-system was 2.77x faster than Mac OS X 10.7 11A419.
Where Mac OS X was much faster than Ubuntu was when building the Apache web-server. Both Mac OS X 10.7 builds were much faster than Mac OS X 10.6.6 and over twice as slow as that was Ubuntu 10.10. That is when all four operating systems were using GCC 4.2.1.