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

What's the point.

[hedwards]

I'm sort of curious what the point is of comparing an alpha to a release candidate. Additionally it's a minor update versus a major update. Throwing in an older release makes it all the more pointless as I'm not seeing anywhere in the summary that they disabled debugging.

Re:What's the point.

[bostei2008]

Just a plug for the Phoronix Test Suite?

Re:What's the point.

[WinterSolstice]

I must say that I'm really fed up with these sorts of benchmarks. They insult the intelligence of IT/technical people AND business people/endusers.

I need to find or create a site that actually benchmarks a variety of systems (windows/linux/unix/bsd) for ACTUAL scenarios that the users of the systems expect them to perform. Not sure how important LAME encoding is for BSD people - I know I don't use it for that. Not sure how many Ubuntu users run DB servers or firewall routers.

Can anyone point me to someplace like this? Someplace where I can see, for example, DB driven dynamic pages served per second - concurrent DB users, scalability to 4+ processors, etc?

I want metrics like SAN performance, DB performance, mail server performance, HA, clustering, firewall performance etc for server "distros" (Windows Server, AIX, Solaris, BSD, Linux, OSX Server)
I want metrics like graphics benchmarks, app response time, those classic GUI task tests for desktop "distros" (Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD).

It annoys me that I see benchmarks that are so narrow and pointless. I can't make reasonable non-fanboy type comparisons when the benchmark doesn't include anything that matters to me.

Summary

[__aaxwdb6741]

The article is of little use other than tell the general populace of Slashdot that FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 are right around the corner, and that we should be hyped. Also FreeBSD 8 is a little faster than FreeBSD 7.2 but a lot slower than Ubuntu Linux 9.10

I'm not surprised, however I do belong to the group that does not really care about relative performance to other OS's as performance is only one of the aspects from the vector of decisions we had to make to finally choose FreeBSD for mass-scale deployment.

Truly crap-tastic charts

[vrmlguy]

Eight pages of bar charts, each gray-on-gray. On half of them, shorter bars mean better performance, on the other half, longer is better; the only way to know which is which is in a legend, written in a small font.

Here's a suggestion: color-code the bars! Green is good, red is bad, yellow is in the middle of the road. For bonus points, choose the saturation based on magnitude of the differences. If the numbers are close, go with grayer bars, if the differences are dramatic, use dramatic colors.

Finally, how about a line chart at the end showing all of the numbers in one place? Yeah, you'd need to convert everything to be consistent if longer or shorter is better, but that's a good idea anyway.