Benchmarks For Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD

Ashmash writes "After their Mac OS X versus Ubuntu benchmarks earlier this month, Phoronix.com has now carried out a performance comparison between Ubuntu 8.10, OpenSolaris 2008.11 and FreeBSD 7.1. They used a dual quad-core workstation with the Phoronix Test Suite to run primarily Java, disk, and computational benchmarks. The 64-bit build of Ubuntu 8.10 was the fastest overall, but FreeBSD and OpenSolaris were first in other areas."

Comments

What about the Sun Studio compiler?

[aliquis]

Various versions of GCC. While one could argue that the compiler is part of the OS it's indeed replaceable so I would had prefered if they had used the same version of GCC and not different for each OS.

It would had been very interesting to see the Solaris results using Sun Studios CC as well (I think it's also available for Linux nowadays?)

Re:Ubuntu may be fast...

[jgtg32a]

dammit so /. decided to eat my good post so I'll just leave the quick and dirty instead. This is why /boot gets its own partition, it lets you remove things very easily, and adding them is simple as well.

Re:Right.

[TheRaven64]

If they wanted a good comparison of what a user sees, they should have used a release version of all operating systems, instead of a release of Ubuntu, a release candidate of Solaris and a beta of FreeBSD. I don't know about Solaris release candidates, but FreeBSD betas come with a lot of extra stuff in libc and the kernel turned on that make tracking issues easier at the expense of speed. Most end users will not be running betas, they will be running the latest stable release.

Re:Right.

[CAIMLAS]

It's kind of crazy how so many benchmark reviews completely overlook actual use and go for one or two "bullet list" type qualifiers for their benchmarks. Granted, I understand this is mainly in the interest of page hits and ad revenue, and by making it controversial they increase those things, but c'mon. Benchmarks are supposed to be pragmatic, and in order to be pragmatic, they have to operate at or near userland conditions, considering CPU, bus, memory and network speed, and the like - as they pertain to the user (whether the user is a hosting company or a desktop end user).

It seems like a pretty trivial matter to do something like this. Say, use something like MySQL for starters - it's available for a dozen or so systems (major Linux distros, OS X, Windows, etc.) It's also typically offered by the vendor, so you'd be able to get an 'ideal' setup for each release.

Or, how about something like a "Firefox benchmark" as that's user-applicable and can use all hardware. Time how long it takes to start FF on all systems with, say, 50 tabs running.

Or how about a straight-up media playing benchmark for 2D performance? Launch a dozen or so DivX videos at once and see how well it performs: measure CPU load, memory use, and the time it takes for FF to start up completely.

Or how about lengthy disk access (maybe crawling a storage tree or such) and measure the time it takes, as well as the amount of memory which gets cached for the process?

This benchmark, as well as most others, seem pretty trivial and useless, and not all that well thought out. They're certainly not scientific!