Not to beat a dead horse, but ...

[Paul Mather]

On Jun 8, 2014, at 7:52 PM, George Mitchell <george+freebsd at m5p.com> wrote:

> On 06/08/14 19:22, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
>> [...]  it turns out that the electricity
>> savings in a year, paid for the entire cost of the new switch...  We
>> were talking ~$250/year in savings, so, upgrading can end up saving
>> you money...
>> 
> Thanks for the advice on what hardware I should run.  But why should I
> believe that upgrading to SMP and running with ULE will make my life
> better?  In fact, when I tried ULE + a six-core system + dnetc + make
> buildworld, etc., a couple of years ago (I do have one SMP system),
> the results were just as appalling compared to 4BSD as with a single
> processor.                                                -- George


One reason to believe that things might be better could be that a lot 
of development can happen in "a couple of years."  It's my belief, in 
fact, that a focus of FreeBSD development in recent years has been in 
improving performance on multi-core systems.

I recently replaced my single-core FreeBSD/i386 system with a six-core 
FreeBSD/amd64 system and my buildworld+buildkernel times went down from 
over 5 hours to under 40 minutes.  The only single-core systems I run 
any more are on FreeBSD/arm.  As others have pointed out, it gets 
harder and harder to buy new mainstream single-core systems, so it's 
inevitable that there will be less contemporary development focus there.

Cheers,

Paul.