Benchmarking the Scalability of BSD and Linux

Fefe writes "I recently did some benchmarks for a talk about scalable network programming I held at Linux Kongress 2003. The benchmark results turned out to be surprising enough to present them on their own. This ought to end those pesky flame wars about whose IP stack or memory management scales better. Or maybe not."

Comments

Nothing new here

[chrysalis]

There's no need for such a very technical benchmark.

Regular usage of various operating systems on the same host makes it obvious.

When it comes to speed and features (or bloat), Linux is more efficient than FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. This is especially significant in SMP environments.

Linux users are always talking about the just-released experimental patches that will help their system to get 0.1% faster, or the most aggressive flags to optimize their Gentoo system.

BSD users just advocate their system with the generic word "robust".

Nowadays, stability is not really the key. Every Linux or BSD free operating system has basically the same stability. The software is the same, with the same bugs. The package system have equivalents (Debian works on NetBSD, Gentoo works a lot like BSD ports, etc) and support for common hardware is almost identical.

The reason to choose one OS over another is often more political than technical. People tend to use FreeBSD just to try "something else". People tend to use Linux because the Mandrake/RedHat/Conectiva/SuSE installers are beautiful or because Gentoo is fashion and a good way to learn what Unices are made of.

But if this is just to use common software like Apache and Qmail there's no real difference except speed. If this is what you need, Linux is definitely the best choice nowadays, especially since 2.6 kernels are almost ready for production use.

For other needs, your mileage may vary.

For instance I love OpenBSD for development. The compiler and the libc have very handy features to automatically detect bogus code. And the man pages are also excellent, with helpful hints.

For firewalls and trafic shaping, I wouldn't use anything but *BSD because of PF. PF is really the best thing in *BSD systems IMHO. The firewall is very easy to configure yet extremely powerful and fast. And I was fond of Iptables before.

For bridging and transparent firewalls, I would also use BSD because it seems to work better than Linux in this area.

In fact it's just like the girl of your dreams. Everyone's always looking for the perfect operating system that will perfectly fit all needs, but it just doesn't exist.