Benchmark (Phoronix): FreeBSD 9.0-RC2 vs. Oracle Linux 6.1

[Michel Talon]

O Hartmann says:

> For the underlying OS, as far as I know, the compiler hasn't as much
> impact as on userland software since autovectorization and other neat
> things are not used during system build.
> 
> From my experience using gcc 4.2 or 4.4/4.5 does not have an impact
> beyond 3% when SSE isn't explicetly enforced.
> 
> More interesting is the performance gain due to the architecture. I
> think it would be very easy for M. Larabel to repeat this benchmark with
> a "bleeding edge"  Ubuntu or Suse as well. And since FreeBSD 9.0 can be
> compiled with CLANG, it should be possible to compare both also with
> "bleeding edge" compilers, say FreeBSD 9/CLANG, Ubuntu 12/gcc 4.6.2.

My experience is that using gcc 4.6 gives *much* better performance than using the obsolete
gcc that is in FreeBSD and much better performance than clang. After all you have to pay the price 
for stupidities such as being GPL free. Or you can see it otherwise, you can compete on the
most GPL free system, or the best working system.  As for the ZFS versus ext3 performance, here also
if you try to sell FreeBSD on features which are supposed to have extraordinary benefits don't be surprised 
when testers use these features and find horrendous performance issues.



--

Michel Talon
talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr