Gadgetopia

Robert Love points to an interesting article on Kernelthread.com on ten OS-level optimizations built in to OSX to improve performance. I’ll bet even you Mac folks didn’t know about most of this stuff.

This document discusses ten things that Apple did (beyond initial/fundamental OS design and implementation) to improve Mac OS X’s performance. Some of these are simply good ideas and obvious candidates for implementation; some are guidelines or tools for developers to help them create high-performance applications, while some are proactive attempts at extracting performance from strategically chosen quarters.

For the record, Windows XP includes some of these optimizations as well. Regarding Linux, Mr. Love says this:

Items 3 and (particularly) 5 are very interesting. For what it is worth, modern Linux systems do 2, 6, 9, and the equivalent of 4 already. My preload work is similar to - albeit much less complicated (and thus less effective?) than - item 1.

Via Robert Love.