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Benchmarks of *BSD, Linux, and Solaris at LinuxTag
AnonymousCow writes "At LinuxTag, an unbiased comparison of performance of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and Solaris." I'll let Tim's comment on this story stand: "Unbiased is hard to claim - all tests can be seen as biased in their formulation - but this is thorough, with 45 slides and
well-explained methodology -- BSD does very well ..."
> FreeBSD... The choice of those, who know how to choose...
You sound like a few wine snobs I know.
FreeBSD may have it's technical merits, but I know plenty of people who run it just for the "fringe appeal". These are the people that ran Slackware way back because it seperated them from the crowd.
After the Red Hat IPO, Linux officially arrived and was no longer properly counter-culture. Once big money was involved, Linux became establishment, and that's just not chic. Then the people who ran Linux just to be different had to look for a new system -- luckily for them, the BSD's provide an easy migration. (yes, I know that BSD dates back to before Linux)
I feel some of this effect myself. I confess that part of why I use Debian is to seperate myself from the kids who purchased a RH boxed set at CompUSA, clicked their way through an install and now proudly play Solitaire in Gnome.
In the old days it *did* mean something to hack together a functional system from the disk sets that Slack provided, or that you downloaded by hand. There was a base level of proficiency that was necessary even to become a Linux user. This exclusion is rapidly breaking down in the Linux world, but lives on in the BSD world.
I'm not sure that any of the BSD's want to lower the entry barrier. Arguments of elitism aside, lowering the barrier definately lowers the mean competence of your user base, and I think that's something FreeBSD and the others would rather live without.
It seems to me that a lot of the *BSD users on Slashdot just wait around for good news about their system so that they can triumphantly reveal how superior their tastes are. It gets a little old.
FreeBSD... Because Linux just isn't leet enough anymore.
--Lenny
It looks like they used Solaris x86, which is not as finely tuned as Solaris/SPARC. It would be intersting to see what Solaris on SPARC could do against linux, assuming they both had similar hardward cost constraints.
Also, I thought an IDE hard drive an odd choice for a high performance server test - wouldn't SCSI or RAID be more appropriate?
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I think one could attribute this to network stack idiosyncracies. For example, if the Linux stack only sets its recv buffer to some specific size that's smaller than the *BSD size, would account for the difference. IIRC, Van Jacobson pointed out a number of problems with the TCP implementation doing weird things in slow start and congestion avoidance that might also account for impedance mismatching.
A similar problem cropped up when Samba was benchmarked against NT's SMB implementation.
-scooter
OK, not trying to start a flamewar here (though I think that for this story, that may be an impossiblity). But was anyone really expecting *BSD to just roll over and die in the face of Linux? BSD has one badass TCP/IP stack, and it can't be much of a suprise that it did well. Keep in mind, readers and moderators, that I mostly use Linux. I'm not trying to be a BSD evangelist. I feel that FreeBSD 4s user-friendlyness is fairly low comared to, say, RH 6.2. But OTOH the *BSDs, especially FreeBSD, seem to really try and make their networking fast as hell (and the succeed).
Simliarly, the fact that Solaris cleaned up in the SQL test shouldn't be suprising.
BTW, some of those graphs were really hard to read, but in some didn't 2.2 wildly outperform 2.4? Specifically Seite 34, parellel compiling, real time. I'm confused!
Questions of bias aside, I think this benchmark makes it pretty clear that there's no such thing as a absolute "best" system--even the author says as much in his conclusions. While the *BSDs performed very well for filesystem I/O, Linux did nicely in the HTTP tests and Solaris topped everyone in SQL performance.
Also, something the holy-war people seem to forget is that even the comparatively badly-performing systems are more than sufficient for the majority of users. How many people, for example, serve more than 10 dynamic pages per second?
I guess what it boils down to is use the one you like best. Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. all have things to recommend them, which all appeal to different people. I personally have the most experience with Linux--I was introduced to it first--so it's what I use daily, but I've had my eye on FreeBSD for a while as well. (No spare computer to put it on yet, though...)
And think of the irony of trying to tear down a Windows monopoly only to replace it with a {Linux,FreeBSD,...} one. Competition is good, and variety is the spice of life. (^: