FreeBSD 13.0 terrible performance in KVM

[dashdruid]

Hello List,

I hope some other folks out there running FreeBSD on KVM as well. I set up a base VM while doing so I noticed that the disk operations are very slow. Many times I edit a file in vim or try to run a command there is a huge lag.

I use UFS as the root filesystem. To have something to compare it with I have tested it against an OpenBSD 6.6 VM on the same host, same hardware. both have 1 vCPU and 1GB of ram, 20GB virtual disk (they are exactly on the same physical disk no raid or anything to have a fair comparison).

Here is an example simple file search time for a non-existent file:

FreeBSD 13

time find / -name cacert.pem

real 0m30.656s
user 0m0.516s
sys 0m3.938s

Second run even worse

real 2m38.618s
user 0m0.711s
sys 0m6.882s

While on the OpenBSD VM I get

time find / -name cacert.pem

real 0m2.258s
user 0m0.290s
sys 0m1.970s

The amount of data is about the same on both systems but I would not consider this a "slight" performance degradation. If the base system is so slow then imagine putting Apache and other servers on top of it. Did anyone run into this?

Unless there is a definitive solution I will opt out to using other BSD variants.