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OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

arstechnica.com

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Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#21

Post by inopinatus »

dmmalam wrote: post #15

Apple losing their server division, and their huge focus on iOS has led to many of their core OS technologies lagging behind. Examples are networking, filesystems (still HFS+), kernel level benchmarks, concurrency, NUMA etc, and especially so compared to what Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and NT have progressed in the last few years. A few years ago, I remember some of their kernel engineers saying Apple's performance goals…

I've wondered the same. Here's some educated guesswork & rumour mongering:

They're known to use "Teradata" (i.e. Dell), "Oracle" (i.e. FKA Sun) & HP DL-series servers alongside NetApp storage. iTunes is reportedly one of the world's largest SAP installations and that'll almost certainly be on AIX or Solaris with Oracle databases on the aforementioned NetApp spindles. OS for other applications? Nothing stops Apple running OSX if they do the driver work, but honestly I'd walk in expecting a mix of Solaris, RHEL and Windows, like every other Enterprise(TM).

[ it'd be nice to think they run a lot of FreeBSD given their UNIX group's credentials but - correct me if I'm out of date here - the bge(4) issues of FreeBSD on HP Gen8 servers seem to undermine that ]

Separately, iCloud is reportedly running on Azure & AWS.

I think it's a pity that Apple abandoned the server market so completely, but I understand how a consumer-first strategy with a strong theme of "same experience everywhere" is antithetical to enterprise needs (specifically the demands of experience control & functional lockdown expected by corporate IT departments). I've done some hard yards inside large enterprises and seen first-hand just how wedded many CIOs are to the whole colossal Microsoft ecosystem; competing with that head-on would be a very long game.

Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#22

Post by Hengjie »

lhnz wrote: post #17

The title should be: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds. Instead of: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air. They have very different meanings.

I'd even suggest: Microsoft's SMB v1 in OS X holds back Wi-Fi transfer speeds.

Since the reason for slow performance is mainly due to SMB v1 (as opposed to Window 8's SMB v3) in their tests and not actually a kernel level problem with OSX.

Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#23

Post by dmmalam »

inopinatus wrote: post #21
dmmalam wrote: post #15

Apple losing their server division, and their huge focus on iOS has led to many of their core OS technologies lagging behind. Examples are networking, filesystems (still HFS+), kernel level benchmarks, concurrency, NUMA etc, and especially so compared to what Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and NT have progressed in the last few years. A few years ago, I remember some of their kernel engineers saying Apple's performance goals…

I've wondered the same. Here's some educated guesswork & rumour mongering: They're known to use "Teradata" (i.e. Dell), "Oracle" (i.e. FKA Sun) & HP DL-series servers alongside NetApp storage. iTunes is reportedly one of the world's largest SAP installations and that'll almost certainly be on AIX or Solaris with Oracle databases on the aforementioned NetApp spindles. OS for other applications? Nothing stops Apple run…

I used to think that buying SUN would have been a smart move for Apple. SUN were pretty much the Apple of enterprise, propriety OS, CPUs, hardware, software. While there was little user synergy, the $5.6 Bn Oracle payed now seems cheap for the access to SUN's IP & patents. They had a talented CPU and OS design team and expertise in building data centers, which Apple is now catching up with.

Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#24

Post by superuser2 »

dmmalam wrote: post #15

Apple losing their server division, and their huge focus on iOS has led to many of their core OS technologies lagging behind. Examples are networking, filesystems (still HFS+), kernel level benchmarks, concurrency, NUMA etc, and especially so compared to what Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and NT have progressed in the last few years. A few years ago, I remember some of their kernel engineers saying Apple's performance goals…

This makes sense, especially considering most people use WiFi to access their DSL or cable modems which are delivering substantially less than 54g anyway.

Few people have a use for the ability to quickly move large files around the house. Media professionals, pirates with HTPCs... what else?

Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#25

Post by film42 »

bdirgo wrote: post #16

17MB/s is still 17 times more then I get normally. I call that an upgrade.

I see it the way you do. I mean, it's not like we have 136Mbps pipes connected to our houses (with the exception of google fiber), but even if someone did.. most public facing servers will be limited to 100Mbps anyways.

Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#26

Post by mblakele »

asafira wrote: post #12

I think it's worth pointing out that Anand did a good piece on this, with some more details into his methodology: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-revi... Anandtech has some great reviews --- I recommend them to anyone that has ever fallen into the trap of reading a CNET review, product a product, and then realizing it falls short of expectations. That, and I also recommend them to anyone inter…

Anand wrote "I spent a good amount of time trying to work around this issue, even manually setting TCP window size in OS X, but came up empty handed. I’m not overly familiar with the networking stack in OS X so it’s very possible that I missed something, but I’m confident in saying that there’s an issue here."

I wonder if he tried net.inet.tcp.win_scale_factor=8 and kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216 as recommended by http://fasterdata.es.net/host-tuning/osx/ and other sites?

Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#27

Post by untog »

Hengjie wrote: post #20

It was incredibly alarming that the author blamed OSX on slow SMB performance and neglected to say which version of SMB they used. OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) only defaults SMB v1, where as Windows 8 defaults SMB v3. SMB v1 is incredibly chatty and has typically has bad performance over high latency networks (in other words the very 802ac network they were testing). And SMBv3 solves that problem altogether. So it's no w…

I think the point is that when you do these tests with all defaults enabled, you're testing what 99% of users will use. Even a simple command line tweak means that the results don't necessarily have any bearing in everyday usage by the majority.

Re: OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

#28

Post by asafira »

asafira wrote: post #12

I think it's worth pointing out that Anand did a good piece on this, with some more details into his methodology: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-revi... Anandtech has some great reviews --- I recommend them to anyone that has ever fallen into the trap of reading a CNET review, product a product, and then realizing it falls short of expectations. That, and I also recommend them to anyone inter…

buying* a product. My bad!
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