FreeBSD 7.1 disk performance issue on ESXi 3.5

[Antony Mawer]

Ivan Voras wrote:
> Sebastiaan van Erk wrote:
>> Sebastiaan van Erk wrote:
>>> (However, just to give you an idea I attached the basic 5.1.2
>>> unixbench outputs (the CPU info for FreeBSD is "fake", since unixbench
>>> does a cat /proc/cpuinfo, so I removed the /proc/ part and copied the
>>> output under linux to the "procinfo" file.)
> 
... benchmark results snipped ...
> 
> The results are ... interesting. It seems that FreeBSD simply dies in
> any test having a high context switch rate. Hmmm, this looks familiar.
> Either I or a collegue of mine had a similar situation some time ago,
> with the same discrepancy in disk speeds and the same difference in
> context switches. Unfortunately, there was no solution.

How would one go about gathering data on such a scenario to help improve 
this? We were planning a project involving VMware deployments with 
FreeBSD 7.1 systems in the near future, but if performance is that bad 
it is likely to be a show stopper.

Where do we start looking and who should we be talking to?

-- Antony