Phoronix Benchmarks: Waht's wrong with FreeBSD 8.0?

[Adam Vande More]

2009/11/30 O. Hartmann <ohartman at zedat.fu-berlin.de>

>  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.
>>>
>>>
>> I've found the benchmark it's using: it runs tiobench from
>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/tiobench/ with the parameters
>> -f 16, 64, 128, 256
>> -t 4, 8, 16, 32
>>
>> It's another project that for some reason doesn't produce releases -
>> the last version was back in 2002. If someone's re-running the
>> benchmark it might be better to use the version from cvs.
>>
>>
>  All right,
> due to my English 9I'm not a native English speaker) and limited knowledge
> of designs and imlementations of OSs, I will be careful formulating the next
> statement.
>
> Many people are, as well as I, not very tight bound to the internals of an
> Operating System like Linux, OpenSolaris or even FreeBSD. If one has to
> decide to switch or use an OS, he will look for benchmarks or even benchmark
> suites - and probably run luckily into Phoronoix-testsuite. But this suite
> seems to tell us a very clear message: Linux or OpenSolaris, just from the
> point of view of 'performance'.
>
> As a scientist, I miss SPEC2006 benchmarks, since those benchmarks are more
> reliable to scientific purposes, but in most cases I saw those benchmarks,
> they were done with a Linux (even if SPEC does more highlighting the
> hardware performance since the OS's performance). Disk I/O is a very crucial
> part of the OS if one produces lots of data contained in small files or
> small chunks.
>
> Are there any recent benchmarks outside Phoronix? Last time I saw a serious
> benchmark was from Kris Kenneway, he measured the performance of databases
> on SMP boxes.
>
> Regards,
> Oliver


I think it's fairly well known disk io isn't FreeBSD's strong suit, but it's
not quite as bad as it looks.  There is some low-hanging fruit here.  If you
where to actually tune ZFS as recommended you'd see stronger results and
hopefully ahci will be enabled by default soon as it is a nice performance
increase in concurre


-- 
Adam Vande More