Benchmark: NetBSD 2.0 beats FreeBSD 5.3 in server performance

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

Quoting Bosko Milekic (bmilekic at technokratis.com):

> Not to mention, FreeBSD5 has yet to be micro-optimized.  How about some
> scalability benchmarks on multi-CPU machines?  The original post
> (particular since it was sent to -advocacy) is FUD.

How many CPU's do you have in mind? I would not expect FreeBSD to
outperform NetBSD by much for a 2-CPU box with a typical server 
workload with typical programs that does not even know to take advantage
of a ''superior'' threading model. For a computer with 4-8 CPU's the
advantage might be much bigger, but I have not yet seen any benchmarks 
targetting computers with that number of CPUs. Partially because 
people does not yet have access to such computers, partially because
most people doesn't care about that kind of scalability.

But this is speculation. I would like to see perfarmonce benchmarks for
your scenario as well. 

I disagree that the original post is entirely FUD. While the conclusion
is subjective, fact is that at the particular mix of microbenchmarks
shows NetBSD faster than FreeBSD. I am wondering if that is the price
you pay on single-cpu boxes to gain speed at the SMP boxes. And if this
is true the question becomes if fine-grained locking is worth the
implementation time when most computers are still single-cpu (Yes, I
know this can change rapidly with the newer CPU types).


-- 
jlouis