You're still missing the point, Chris. OS X is not inefficient - it is just doing a lot.
OS X is inefficent, scarily so, just in areas most aren't used to trying to directly benchmark. The majority of the OS X code is actually fairly tight and clean, the bottleneck I'm refering to stems from the bodging of BSD ontop of Mach. The way Apple went about this results in a kernel that blocks FAR more than it needs to.
Now, Apple isn't the only one with this problem, the FreeBSD 5.x tree's primary goal is to get rid of the BGL (Big Giant Lock) present within the FreeBSD kernel, other OSs suffer from it to some degree or annother. The difference is the extra layer the Mach interface imposes, cutting Apple's threading down to one tenth the speed of other os's on the same hardware.
In the days of very light, if any multitasking, this wouldn't present itself as a problem. OS X and other modern OSs on the other hand always have a slew of processes active in the background, even when you're not actively doing anything, putting much more pressure on the OS's threading capibilities.
Other Mach OSs with BSD or Linux or other api's bolted ontop (MKlinux) have shown similar performance problems. Apple is taking steps to correct it, Tiger breaks the BGL up into two big locks, but they need to get further before you really start to see OS X scream.
Joshua Coombs
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