Anatomy of Perfomance tests

[Walter Hurry]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:40:37 +0200, Julien Cigar wrote:

> On 06/29/2012 11:00, Fred Morcos wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Wojciech Puchar
>> <wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>  wrote:
>>> Most probably all filesystems were used with defaults.
>>>
>>> MAYBE softupdates, but not even sure for this. Compare this to linux
>>> which is async-like. Comparing with UFS+async would be more fair.
>>>
>>> Still - FreeBSD default MAXPHYS in param.h is far too low. i change it
>>> to 2048*1024 (default is 128*1024) and improvement on handling large
>>> files is huge. I run that setting everywhere. No problems.
>>>
>>> I already talked about it on forum but was ignored.
>>>
>>> As for scientific processing it should not depend much from OS at all,
>>> but for sure it depends on crappy compiler that Juniper wanted...
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>> I would not worry too much about what this guy says. Judging from his
>> interpretations of the plots, he doesn't seem to know much about the
>> benchmarks he is running and why they behave that way on the different
>> systems. I think he just runs and publishes everything that says
>> benchmark on it, without truly understanding what's going on or even
>> going through the effort of providing fair comparisons.
>>
>> That said, I think that the Linux kernel performs better simply due to
>> wider adoption (larger developer base, wider set of use-cases, etc)
>> and thus a higher chance of getting performance improvements.
> 
> Note that stability matters too.
> I remembered a bench on PostgreSQL where Linux was faster, but at some
> point the machine had to be rebooted because it became unresponsive.
> 
Unscientific, anecdotal and entirely subjective, but here's my 2c.

I run both FreeBSD and Linux on the same machine in a multi-boot 
configuration. Each has its default disk configuration (UFS + SJ vs. Ext4 
with journalling).

Linux is noticeably faster, but the performance of both is satisfactory, 
and I prefer FreeBSD.

To echo Julien, benchmarks aren't everything.