With the recent announcement that Apple's CalDAV server was built on Twisted and the following announcement that Apple had donated an Xserve to the Twisted project, it's become clear that Apple has some interest in Twisted.

Twisted isn't exactly the most popular framework on the planet, so I found this a little surprising but chalked it up to mysterious forces.

This morning I was showering and I was thinking about how lame it was to get an Xserve. I'd seen benchmarks that demonstrated that OSX simply is not there as a server OS. The blame is apparently to be placed on the overhead associated with spawning threads and processes on OSX under Mach. The performance of server processes like Apache and MySQL is terrible compared to Linux on the same hardware.

Then it dawned on me: this is undoubtedly the root of Apple's interest in Twisted: it's asyncronous, hence, no threads. I've done no benchmarks or even heard of any, but if Twisted is twice as slow as Apache on Linux, and Apache on OSX is five times as slow as Apache on Linux, then it stands to reason that Twisted on OSX is at least twice as fast as Apache on OSX.

Pure speculation of course, since I've neither seen nor done any type of benchmarks, but it's interesting speculation.