Real Insight on Performance

[Rahul]

Hi all,

I am looking to install Unix (and/or like) system for server to run
some highly computational and multi-threaded applications. My
background being pretty much all Windows, I am a novice to this field.
I have grasped some basics by reading some material on web and how-to
books but event after extensive digging around on web for real
performance numbers on various operating systems, I still haven't
found anything useful. Most of the data I found were basically
comparisons of operating systems running MySQL or PostgreSQL to see
how many connections or simple look up queries they each can server
per second sort of things. But nothing that would point to underlying
operations like threading, cache-ing, time slicing, I/O, etc.

Now, I must admit most of the material showed Linux having upper hand.
But I am not convinced FreeBSD would be behind in almost all
performance benchmarks from always hearing the legendary performance
and stability characteristics of FreeBSD.

Can you please shed some light on what I really should be looking for
in FreeBSD to optimize it to it's best performance? Am I expecting
something that is just purely not BSD's priority or philosophy, per
se? Is there some material I can look over? (note: I've gone through
the 7.0 Preview and Tuning documentation on FreeBSD's site already.)



Thanks.