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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."
...once I'm done compiling.
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.
When my friends ask me about Linux, I usually steer them toward Ubuntu first, as it's the most user friendly and well-supported distro out there. Canonical really puts a lot of development work into it, and it shows (in this result and many others). In the past, I usually avoided the Linux topic altogether, as there were so many confusing distros that even trying to explain the concept of Linux to non-geeks (and even many geeks) was a huge pain in the ass. So, I for one welcome our new Ubuntu overlords.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just a plug for the Phoronix Test Suite?
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.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Well, with the number of distros out there, it's inevitable that they'd leave out most of them. But I must admit that leaving out every other distro makes it kind of hard to know if Ubuntu is doing better than the pack or about the same.
It's kind of suspect, in my opinion, that the older release was doing so much better than the newer one, considering all the time that's been spent in recent times on optimizing various portions of the source. It's also worth noting that probably a much larger portion of the FreeBSD user base will recompile their kernel pretty much immediately with basic optimizations and removing the cruft that they don't need or want.
From the update notes in /usr/src/UPDATING:
Since the article didn't mention anything about disabling all the debugging options, I'll consider this an invalid benchmark until shown otherwise.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Actually, you'll probably do quite a bit of compiling in FreeBSD too. While you can pull binary packages, most people I know prefer to use a package manager like portsnap and compile source packages.
If you have a script to take care of compiling the common stuff, then just "make config" everything that need user input and let it fly. Granted, most servers I've used BSD on have been dual or quad core Xeon/AMD PC's with a fair bit of RAM, so it is overall a fairly quick process, though it was still not too bad on a few P4-era celerons.
The nice thing about FreeBSD source-compiled apps that I truly did love compared to BSD is the little tweaks you could do to avoid tons of crap dependencies. Debian used to be fairly "clean" as far as deps, but both Ubuntu and Deb are now getting quite ugly in that you get rather unwanted stuff in order to get the package you want. In most FreeBSD stuff, for example, I can check the "No X Server" box and happily compile my apps without any X support whatsoever. On Debian/Ubuntu I end up trying to install some CLI system monitoring tool or CUPS, whatever, and end up with a whackload of x.org stuff because it's tied to some font which is loosely tied to the actual package I'm trying to install. On Ubuntu desktops, trying to exorcize the demons of "Evolution" without having it remove other important stuff due to deps is near impossible. Sometimes there's a separate branch for a "cleaner" install, but often enough not.
Of course, BSD ain't perfect. Linux tends to have a lot of "new" stuff that BSD is a little more "conservative" in bringing into the mainline (iSCSI support for example was a fairly recent addition compared to 'nix), but overall the package system is powerful indeed.
Having not used Gentoo (yet) but knowing others who have, it seems like it might be somewhat similar in concept. The issues I've heard with are mostly in people getting to the up-and-running stage, but - similar to BSD - avoid annoying little conflicts or unwanted cruft is a lot easier than Debian/Ubuntu's precompiled binaries. Of course, I've also heard of much frustration in both if you have find halfway through a *long* compile that you missed something you should have flagged/included.