On Monday, December 16, 2002, at 12:05 PM, Puneet Kishor wrote:
Yes, the iBook CPU is 200 Mhz slower, and god only knows how we can compare a P3 to G3, but 2.5 times the time taken is a bit much. Coming back to my initial assertion -- Could some of this be attributed to the way the perl binary is compiled?I doubt it. It's very true that the "generic" distribution of GCC is not well optimized for the PowerPC, but Apple has done lots of work in that area.
Given the size of the input file, I'd guess that your script is I/O bound. If I recall correctly, the iBook uses 66MB/s IDE, and ships with a pokey hard drive - 4200RPM or thereabouts. If your PC is a desktop machine, its HD is probably either 100MB/s or 133MB/s, and either 5400 or 7200 RPM. The difference in file I/O performance is considerable.
A couple of things you could try, to narrow down the source of the difference:
Try re-running the test without the filtering and sorting; that is, just time how long it takes on each machine, just to read in the source file.
If you have access to an external FireWire drive, you could try running the test on that.
It's also worth noting that your test took over two minutes on the PC - depending on your power settings, your iBook may have spun down its internal HD while your script was filtering and sorting records. If that's the case, it would have had to start the HD back up before writing the output, causing a significant delay.
sherm--
UNIX: Where /sbin/init is Job 1.
