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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."
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?)
Yes, I, too, find this nut and bolt set inadequate for the purpose of assisting Chinese Rhinoceros to learn Western astrology. It seems silly that purple monkey dishwasher.
I was a bit disappointed by the results, being a FreeBSD fan myself. However, in my quick scan of the article, I didn't see any mention of how they configured the OS. If they truly used the stock 7.1-BETA2 install, that would mean that debugging mode is enabled in the kernel (and maybe the userland, I'm not 100% sure here). Unless I've misunderstood FreeBSD's release methods over the years, they don't disable the debugging until either the RC builds or maybe even the final release tag.
Still, FreeBSD came out on top on 3 of the tests -- not bad for a beta release. I can't wait for 7.1, as using 7.0 on my desktop since its release has been great. I just hope the fully-virtualized IP stack within jails made it into 7.1, as well as a slightly more stable ZFS.
Method of processing duck feet
Except that they tested FreeBSD 7.1 beta 2. FreeBSD betas are compiled with extra debugging and checking code which slows the end result down a lot. This includes the WITNESS kernel flags and the malloc checking. These encourage early and reproducible failure for bugs. For release versions of FreeBSD, these are turned off, which generally gives a noticeable speed increase. I note that the Solaris version they tested was a release candidate too, so I wonder if the same is true there.
A lot of their benchmarks seemed to be CPU-limited, with little OS involvement (e.g. FFT, RSA). Differences here are likely to be more down to malloc() implementation than anything in the kernel. In a FreeBSD beta, malloc will be adding guard pages and initialising data to a known value to check for overflows. In Solaris, I'm not sure what the current malloc() strategy is - last time I used Solaris it was still using a brk()-based malloc() (where FreeBSD and Linux both now tend to use mmap()-based versions).
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Uninstalling FreeBSD means deleting the partition. It either uses the boot loader you already had installed, or it installs a multiboot menu that fits in the MBR, so continues to work when the partition has gone away. If you install Ubuntu, I believe it installs grub and points the MBR at stuff on your /boot partition. If you destroy this, you will not be able to boot any OS.
Not that this is a major problem, since uninstalling an OS (outside of a VM) is not something that many people do very often.
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Interesting results, and great if you're planning a server, but what about desktop use?
How well does each OS do when doing something like playing back audio/video, and handling background processing loads? What about performance and system response as the load climbs up? (load averages of 5/10/20 ?).
Only because I've seen Linux systems start to crumble around 5 (uniproc machine), and easily get unusuable, but have heard reports of BSD machines being able to still play MP3s without skipping/suttering even around 20 or so...
(And yes, I'll allow tweaking system priorities - it only gets you so far, and impacts the other background processing tasks, to which we'll also be interested in how long they take to run. So renicing the media player to -20 works, but not if it makes all the other tasks take 10x as long to finish...).
Except that they tested FreeBSD 7.1 beta 2. FreeBSD betas are compiled with extra debugging and checking code which slows the end result down a lot. This includes the WITNESS kernel flags and the malloc checking.
This is only true in HEAD which will eventually be FreeBSD 8.x. They are turned off in the FreeBSD 7.x branch (RELENG_7)
I have not played with Open Solaris but with normal Solaris you need to set parameters in the /etc/system file to get good performance. By default Solaris is set very conservative. In many tests I have run Solaris may not be the fastest with single test but under a heavy load with many applications running my experience has been it can handle a much bigger load then Linux on the same hardware. I use both but for backend heavy loaded servers I would choose Solaris.