[Chinasaur]

Greets,

I searched but couldn't find any report of a Benchmark of DF using OS X vs a PPC Linux. Has anyone ever done such a test?

I've seen different flavors, Dist's, Kernels give more/less structures on a given X86 machine and wanted to know what the most efficient OS platform was for my G3 cruncher.

I'll run as I get the time if nobody has any info.

TIA

[mikkyo]

You'll have to find a ppc linux client before you begin to worry about which is better.

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by mikkyo:
You'll have to find a ppc linux client before you begin to worry about which is better.

This one?
ftp://ftp.mshri.on.ca/pub/distribfol...nux-ppc.tar.gz

My only linux ppc box is my old pm 8500. No OSX for it.

[Chinasaur]

What? Oh you meant the DF client.

YellowDog runs on my G3. Finding one is simple.

Debian Mandrake. All these run. Probably NetBSD runs on G3 as well.

I'll run the test as I get time. I'm surprised nobody had tested to see which was faster. The X86 camps constantly benchmarks distributions vs Windows vs other OS's.

Cheers

[mikkyo]

I was thinking of F@H not Dumb Folding.
Sorry.
You can also run the windows version under WINE no?
Scott would know more about that.
There is a nice benchmarking perl script (if it still works) somewhere that you can use to check to see who is faster.

Scott, why are you wasting power($$) to run an 8500?
That machine draws as much power as a modern one with a 200W supply and is like 10M times slower.

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by mikkyo:
I was thinking of F@H not Dumb Folding.
Sorry.
You can also run the windows version under WINE no?
Scott would know more about that.
There is a nice benchmarking perl script (if it still works) somewhere that you can use to check to see who is faster.

Scott, why are you wasting power($$) to run an 8500?
That machine draws as much power as a modern one with a 200W supply and is like 10M times slower.

You can run it under wine, but for DF, the linux client is faster then the windows client, or at least it was the last time I checked.

For benchmarking, the client has a -bench switch.
Just do 'foldtrajlite -bench'.
It can take a little while to run. When it's done, it'll give 4 numbers. Smaller is better.

Why do I run the 8500?
A few reasons.
1) Sentimental value. It was my first computer, a gift from my grandparents.
2) It still works fine. Of course, the only original parts in it are the case, power supply, cables, and motherboard. It started life as a 120MHz 604, it's now a 300MHz G3 with 1MB of L2 cache. It's got 176MB of ram (one bad 16MB stick in it that I haven't bothered removing), and a nice fast 4.3GB IBM Ultrastar.
It's job is to be the proxy server for my network, which it does just fine. It does useful things like proxy debian updates and the base install, so when I'm setting up a new box it DLs at around 1MB/sec. It's also super useful for OSX software updates. When you have 5 OSX machines on a network, it's nice to only have to DL updates once.
Although the NIC refuses to negotiate to 10base full duplex like it used to, which is really annoying, but oh well, it's still fast enough.

It doesn't use much power. I'll power profile it one of these days, but I do know that it plus my 2 routers and 2 switches uses a lot less power then either of my single athlon servers, and those use around 120W of power each.

Is that a good enough reason?

[Chinasaur]

Bench is broken under 10.2.x.

I don't know anyone who would run DF under Wine...I've heard that solution for F@H, but it would be mch slower for DF.

[Welnic]

The -bench switch has been fixed, it was broken for a while. It doesn't return a separate system time though.

[mikkyo]

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
Is that a good enough reason?

You neglected to mention it was upgraded.
A G3 is many time faster than a 604, heh.