FreeBSD 8.0 Performance (at Phoronix)

[Matt Thyer]

2009/11/30 David Naylor <naylor.b.david at gmail.com>:
> HI,
>
> Phoronix recently published a comparative benchmark[1] for FreeBSD 7.2/8.0
> against Linux and OpenSolaris.  I would like to bring some of the good and bad
> to light (in the hopes that the developers with the correct expertise will be
> intrigued).
>
> The tests were performed with a 'standard' installation of FreeBSD on a Lenovo
> ThinkPad T61.
>
> I've tried to eliminate tests who's performance is a result of compiler
> differences and/or 3rd party applications and tests who's statistical
> significance are not so strong (subjective guess).
>
> Improvements for FreeBSD 8.0 vs 7.2:
>  - 7-Zip Compression (page 3)
>  - Timed MAFFT Alignment (page 5)
>  - GraphicsMagick (page 5)
>  - Threaded IO (64MB Random Write - 32 threads) (page 7)
>  - Threaded IO (64MB Read - 32 threads) (page 7)
>
> Regressions for FreeBSD 8.0 vs 7.2:
>  - Gzip compressions of a 2GB file (page 3)
>  - C-Ray (page 4)
>  - Threaded IO (64MB Write - 4 threads) (page 7)
>  - Threaded IO (64MB Write - 32 threads) (page 7)
>
> Poor performance relative to Linux and OpenSolaris
>  - Threaded IO (especially random writes) (page 7)
>  - OpenSSL (RSA 4096bit) (page 8)
>  - PostMark (disk transaction) (page 8)
>
> It appears that threaded activity on UFS does not fair well against Linux/ext4
> and OpenSolaris/ZFS.  Phoronix intends to do a comparative test against
> FreeBSD and OpenSolaris on ZFS.
>
> Regards,
>
> David
>
> 1)
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd8_benchmarks&num=1
>

How much of the problem is due to FreeBSD staying with GCC 4.2.1 (due
to the GPL v3 issue) compared with Linux using the latest GCC ?

Is CLANG/LLVM expected to perform better ?

How much is due to FreeBSD using an older Xorg ? (or is this not
relevant to the benchmarks ?).

A recent Phoronix article showed that Ubuntu 9.04 (I think) performed
worse than Windows (7 I think) using the same open source software.
Interestingly though, Windows binaries generally ran faster under
Ubuntu using Wine than they did under Windows.  This makes one think
that GCC still has a long way to go compared to MS Visual Studio (or
Wine has a lot less overhead than a full Windows system).

Matthew