FreeBSD 8.0 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has brought benchmarks comparing the FreeBSD 8.0-RC and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 operating systems. FreeBSD rather ends up taking a wallop to Ubuntu Linux, but there are a few areas where FreeBSD 8 ran well. They also posted benchmarks comparing this near-final FreeBSD 8.0 build to that of FreeBSD 7.2 to show performance improvements there but with a few regressions."

Comments

FreeBSD is still in debugging mode

[Just Some Guy]

From the update notes in /usr/src/UPDATING:

NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT FreeBSD 8.x IS SLOW:
FreeBSD 8.x has many debugging features turned on, in both the kernel and userland. These features attempt to detect incorrect use of system primitives, and encourage loud failure through extra sanity checking and fail stop semantics. They also substantially impact system performance. If you want to do performance measurement, benchmarking, and optimization, you'll want to turn them off. This includes various WITNESS- related kernel options, INVARIANTS, malloc debugging flags in userland, and various verbose features in the kernel. Many developers choose to disable these features on build machines to maximize performance. (To disable malloc debugging, run ln -s aj /etc/malloc.conf.)

Since the article didn't mention anything about disabling all the debugging options, I'll consider this an invalid benchmark until shown otherwise.