FreeBSD AMD64 + high performance MySQL - Possible?

[Jeremy Gray]

A person I know runs a very large forum using a dual AMD Opteron box
running AMD64 Linux for the MySQL database backend. I think he does several
thousand concurrent connections per second or something.

I intend to do the same, and have the hardware sitting here to do it...

But alas, I am a FreeBSD user and would like to stay that way for this
database server if possible.


I read a lot on Jeremy Zawodny's BLOG site (Yahoo's server god I guess)
where he initially slammed MySQL on FreeBSD because of FreeBSD's
poor thread support vs linux and then made several follow ups....

The first stating that if you compile MySQL on FreeBSD with inuxThreads
support it will eliminate the poor threading issue. (Which, afaik, is not 
an option
  for me on AMD64)

The second follow up he made was that FreeBSD 5.2 and on (for i386) use
a new threading method (called?) that helps resolve FreeBSD's threading issues
with MySQL.

But I noticed in just last weeks archives that people were still discussing
FreeBSD + MySQL problems... presumably on intel architecture.

Several weeks ago the MySQL port maintainer Alex Dupre was given
access to our Opteron machine in order to make optimizations the port
for AMD64. But I think at the time he said the new threading was still
being worked on or something.

So I guess my question is... does anyone know the best way to compile
MySQL on an AMD64 box without too much (or any) performance loss over
an identical linux machine?


If anyone from the FreeBSD/AMD64 dev team would like to use our hardware
to optimize threading for MySQL on AMD64, and compare the results to a linux
install (I have a linux install on identical drive we can swap out)...

I would be more than willing to donate access to interested and qualified 
parties.

Dual Opteron 241 CPUs, 2 Gigs ram.
Tyan S2880UGNR w/ LSI Zero Channel Raid card
4x 15k rpm SCSI drives running 2 raid 0 channels.
Swapable OS/system drive.



Thanks for any information!