Mac OS X: HFS+ vs. UFS

One of the major issues with Mac OS X is it's filesystem performance.

When I got my first Mac it came with Jaguar pre-installed. I didn't know much about Mac in general or Mac OS X in particular. Quite soon I noticed the performance when using Python was very bad. Starting up Zope 2 took almost 30 seconds, running all Zope 3 unit tests about 30 minutes.

One hint I got was Apple's filesystem HFS+ being very slow. So I made a little experiment. I created a disk image file with UFS copied and Zope 3 into it. Running the Zope 3 unit tests now took only 15 minutes. Wow. So having a UFS file system on top of an HFS+ disk increased the performance.

After getting Panther, I just wiped HFS+ off the disk and installed everything on UFS. I had absolutely no problems so far. The whole system is considerably faster. And the Zope 3 unit tests take 5 minutes now.