New Performance Mailing List for FreeBSD

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD's fast as is, but it appears that folks over there are going the extra mile to make sure that it continues to be the top dog according to this recent announcement. With 5.1 promising to have native threads and 5.1 only a few months out, it is really good to see performance being taken seriously."

I thought FreeBSD was already winning there.

[mnmn]

FreeBSDs performance seemed to me to be quite close to say Linux 2.5 running on XFS. I couldnt tell which was better but I think both were quite close to the hardwares ability. I havent tried running many threaded apps, at least not under pressure..

I hope they dont take focus away from simplicity and robustness here. Multithreading is tricky, look at all the problems Linux had.. As a customer, I wouldnt want multithreading at all if theres any risk to the robust architecture.

Re:I thought FreeBSD was already winning there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing threads right is tricky and is why it's taken over two years to get done right (more correct than Slowaris' threading too). It's close to finished and coming down the home streatch of development I think. If you want to know why Linux's threading is an ugly and bastardized hack, read this paper on KSE [aims.com.au].

Re:I thought FreeBSD was already winning there.

[cpeterso]

Where are the performance benchmarks demonstrating FreeBSD (4 or 5) dominance? I haven't seen FreeBSD used in any big time benchmarks..??

This just in...

[Znonymous Coward]

From the office of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf :

BSD isn't dead.

(Unless you live in a cave, you will get this joke)

Re:This just in...

[jo42]

> FreeBSD is dying

Who let the Iraqi Information Minister out of Baghdad?

Experience

[chrysalis]

I just love BSD.

I used to go with Linux for everything a while back, but once you discover BSD, the ports system, IPF andPF, and the way everything is properly packaged, you just fall in love with BSD.

But when it comes to performance, from an user point of view, Linux still looks better.

My home workstation has both FreeBSD 5-current and Gentoo Linux. I lately installed a 2.5.x kernel (the current running one is 2.5.67-mm1), and I must say that I was really impressed.

Not sure how latest Linux kernels perform in a server environment, but on a workstation, everything is very responsive. Even when there is a lot of I/O (local disk-to-disk backups) or CPU activity (compilation), KDE is always smooth. Under load, Windows can take some time to refresh their content, but as soon as something is typed on the keyboard, or clicked with the mouse, the effect is immediate.

While FreeBSD is rather fast (it looks like there was a big speedup regarding disk I/O between FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x), I now find it slow when I switch from Linux to FreeBSD.

Slow is maybe not the right word, but there is a lot of "lag". When the system is busy, there's a slight delay between an action with the mouse or the keyboard and its effect. This is especially noticable with Konqueror. And when there is a compilation going on, XMMS oftens stops playing properly (there are cutoffs in the sound) .

I also tried Mnogosearch (MySQL 4 + cache mode) on both Linux and FreeBSD 5-current. Searches are as fast on both OS. But during indexation, when the cached daemon flushes its buffers, FreeBSD nearly freezes. I mean that even logging in through SSH becomes very long. On Linux, although the hard disk seems to turns a lot, the system keeps being responsive for other tasks.

Re:Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a problem with the current non-blocking implementation of libc_r. The native threading support (either 1:1/libthr or M:N/KSE) will solve this. libthr supposedly isn't production quality yet, but it is committed and many have noted that this addresses most of that threaded performance gap you speak of.

Re:Experience

[Maudus]

The comparison might be interesting once again with first 5-stable FreeBSD release. 5-current is impressively fast, but still it is not as fast as it can be. As a developer release it has a lot of debugging features turned on, many parts of code has not been optimized yet etc. -- I just managed to recovere accidentally deleted file (read: a day of work). Thanks god to cat and grep and, of course, FreeBSD.

I like using FreeBSD

[Gizzmonic]

My own and others!

Re:freebsd usability

[pooh666]

WHY did you guys not mod up this excellent answer???