Phoronix Benchmarks: Waht's wrong with FreeBSD 8.0?

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:19:37AM +0100, Thomas Backman wrote:
> > I'm just wondering what's wrong with FreeBSD 8.0/amd64 when I read the Benchmarks on Phoronix.org's website. Especially FreeBSD's threaded I/O shows in contrast to all claims that have been to be improoved the opposite.
> Corrected link: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd8_benchmarks&num=1
> 
> And yeah, quite honestly: disk scheduling in FreeBSD appears to suck... The only reason I'm not switching from Linux. :(
> 
> Regards,
> Thomas
> 
> (PS. See my thread about horrible console latency during disk IO in the archives, very related. DS.)_______________________________________________

Given this is a discussion predominantly with disk I/O and/or filesystem
"stuff", possibly the discussion should be on -fs instead?  I do see the
reasoning behind discussing it on -stable though.

I haven't looked at the Phoronix Test Suite[1], which is what's being
used for testing "threaded I/O".  I don't understand what "threaded I/O"
means in this context; I'm assuming it means making a separate LWP for
each I/O transaction, e.g. multiple LWPs for I/O (within a single
program).  Some technical details of the implementation/test methodology
would need to be provided for someone to assist in tracking down the
problem.

However, I will take the time to point out one key piece of info:

The Phoronix Test Suite appears to be written entirely in PHP[2].  I've
looked at the source and it does appear to be PHP-based (with reliance
on numerous third-party C-based libraries, of course; this is normal).
Given that, I'm not sure I can really take the results of some of those
tests seriously.  I'm not dissuading the evidence, I'm just saying, it's
more of a "PHP benchmark on <OS>" than it is an OS benchmark.

[1]: http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/
[2]: http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=downloads

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |