I have previously mentioned an article by AnandTech in which they documented a fairly convincing lab exercise in which it was shown that Mac OS X Tiger Server made a pretty poor show of running MySQL. In fact, they claimed, OS X was up to 5 times slower than Linux running the same benchmarks on the same G5 hardware.
We have a customer who presently run a LAMP application (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) that we set up for them on Red Hat Linux, running on Dell PowerEdge hardware and it's doing a sterling job.
Trouble is that they now want to scale up quite significantly, and the server that they presently have can't expand to give them enough storage without an external array (bear with me here).
So, I got to thinking about how we could give them a good value proposition in terms of storage expansion, and that led me to Xserve RAID. I had a chance to chat to the Apple guys at this years Mac Expo, and found out that the Xserve RAID is in fact Red Hat Certified, so that opens up a good option in terms of just bunging more storage on the PowerEdge server. Further research indicates that this may only be for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and we are running 4, so I don't know where that leaves us.
The Apple guys also said that the MySQL performance problem had been addressed in 10.4.7 (but they would). So, while we're at it, we might want to beef up the processing side of things, so why not look at a nice spanky 64-bit Intel Xserve if it's all good now? And if we've got an Xserve and Xserve RAID, then Mac OS X might not be such a bad idea, but that brings us back to the MySQL performance problem.
However, I reasoned that since OS X is now on Intel, perhaps the situation may have changed. A bit more research has led me to find that firstly, AnandTech's findings were skewed, and secondly that OS X may be a more compelling option after all (great article).
We have a customer who presently run a LAMP application (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) that we set up for them on Red Hat Linux, running on Dell PowerEdge hardware and it's doing a sterling job.
Trouble is that they now want to scale up quite significantly, and the server that they presently have can't expand to give them enough storage without an external array (bear with me here).
So, I got to thinking about how we could give them a good value proposition in terms of storage expansion, and that led me to Xserve RAID. I had a chance to chat to the Apple guys at this years Mac Expo, and found out that the Xserve RAID is in fact Red Hat Certified, so that opens up a good option in terms of just bunging more storage on the PowerEdge server. Further research indicates that this may only be for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and we are running 4, so I don't know where that leaves us.
The Apple guys also said that the MySQL performance problem had been addressed in 10.4.7 (but they would). So, while we're at it, we might want to beef up the processing side of things, so why not look at a nice spanky 64-bit Intel Xserve if it's all good now? And if we've got an Xserve and Xserve RAID, then Mac OS X might not be such a bad idea, but that brings us back to the MySQL performance problem.
However, I reasoned that since OS X is now on Intel, perhaps the situation may have changed. A bit more research has led me to find that firstly, AnandTech's findings were skewed, and secondly that OS X may be a more compelling option after all (great article).
