Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion DP2 Battles Ubuntu 10.10
While in most disk tests Linux and the EXT4 file-system come out ahead of Apple's operating system, the PostgreSQL database server does much better under the HFS+ file-system. Mac OS X 10.7 11A419 handles more than ten times the number of transactions per second as Ubuntu 10.10, which leads us to wonder if HFS+ is not syncing to the disk in a manner as safe as EXT4 and its data integrity improvements. The Mac OS X 10.7 numbers are also down compared to Mac OS X 10.6.6 where its PostregreSQL speed was 13.75x faster than Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 10.10 ends up being back on top when it comes to the PostMark mail server disk test where it is approximately 52% faster than Mac OS X 10.7 at this time in its development cycle.
Ubuntu 10.10 with EXT4 does suffer when it comes to eight threads of 128MB random writes, but the performance was down across all four operating systems with this being a rather demanding workload for an Intel Core 2 Duo mini computer with a notebook-designed SATA HDD.
EXT4 flips back on top for a small lead with its random read performance of 16 threads at 128MB.