FreeBSD vs Ubuntu - Discuss...

[O. Hartmann]

Attilio Rao wrote:
> 2009/9/29 Randy Schultz <schulra at earlham.edu>:
>> ----- "Andrew Kuriger" <a.kuriger at liquidphlux.com> spaketh thusly:
>>
>> |
>> | Since the article says that they left the debugging features on I
>> | think
>> | this has a bit to do with it. Obviously the testers didn't care to
>> | read the
>> | documentation, and didn't seem to care to use the same compiler which
>> | is
>> | available in ports, I believe it is safe to chuck this lame
>> | benchmark.
>>
>>
>> Hrm.  IMHO, this benchmark actually tells us something interesting.  It tells us
>> that with the anchor thrown overboard, freebsd is nearly as fast as linux.
> 
> I don't think this is the case.
> The tester claims to be using FreeBSD-RC1 which has all the mentioned
> debugging options off.
> And yes, we should adjust UPDATING in order to remove the (now)
> misleading writing about the debugging options.
> 
> I think that the most interesting opionion these benchmarks tell is
> that we are slow on random, threaded  I/O operations. I think we need
> to investigate more in this direction.
> 
> Attilio
> 
> 

Well, since FreeBSD 8.0 started, I realized on several boxes (doens't
matter whether SMP or UP, 2 GB or 8 GB or 16 GB) massive performance
issues when compiling, even on a 8-core box. This is not 'measured' in
hard numbers, it is the 'feeling' since we swapped to 8.0, but still
using the same setup and software environment. On boxes with X11, on
heavy disk I/O and/or heavy compiling, X11 clients sometimes stops for
90 seconds, mouse gets jumpy etc. This is well known and well ignored,
although I'm not the only one experiencing this.

I think this will not change soon. ZFS is, at this moment, the only
thing that keeps me with FreeBSD. In every other case, serving, number
crunching (oh, we need a lot of I/O performance in those number
crunching environments) and even simple desktop, Linux, mostly Ubuntu
and RedHat, outperforms FreeBSD.