performance difference between OSx and Windows

[Alex Martelli]

Brian <bnblazer at gmail.com> wrote:

> dfj225 at gmail.com wrote:
> > Hi Brian,
> >
> > You may have already considered this, but since I didn't see it
> > mentioned in your post, I'll reply anyway.
> >
> > I believe the Python binaries that Apple includes with OS X are always
> > slightly behind the latest that you can get from the official sources.
> > I'm not infront of my Mac right now, so I can't tell you the disparity.
> 
> You are right.  Apple is quite far behind.  I upgraded to 2.4.2 from
> 2.3.x.  The MS box has the same version.

There's an excellent Universal version of 2.4.3 for MacOSX out on
python.org and I suggest you get it.

BTW, as I recently posted to rec.games.bridge and in more detail to
it.comp.macintosh (in Italian), these days in my spare time I'm porting
a library originally coded for Windows by Bo Haglund (whom I thank for
giving me the sources, albeit under NDA), which does double-dummy
analysis of bridge hands, to run as a Python extension under MacOSX and
Linux (see http://www.aleax.it/Bridge ).  Elapsed time per deal for
hundreds of thousands of deals in a particularly difficult class
(totally flat hands of middling strength playing at NT) is about:

1.26 seconds      iBook G4 12" (1.33 GHz)
0.88 seconds      Pentium 4 3.20 GHz (on Linux -- gcc 3.2)
0.80 seconds      Powermac G5 dual 1.8 GHz
0.65 seconds      Macbook Pro 2.0 GHz

all w/Python 2.4.3, all save the Pentium w/gcc 4 and MacOSX 10.4, all
times for using a single core/processor (I just run two processes when I
want to max out BOTH cores/processors -- the analysis, which is a very
sophisticated version of alpha-beta-pruning tree-search, easily takes 99
to 100% of CPU time with little memory, disk or other I/O use).


Alex