FreeBSD has long been plagued by less-than-best SMP performance, especially in versions 4 and 5. Slashdot is reporting FreeBSD 7.0 SMP performs much better, and is ahead of Linux.
“After major improvements in SMP support in FreeBSD 7.0, benchmarks show it performing 15% better than the latest Linux kernels (PDF, see slides 17 to 19) on 8 CPUs under PostgreSQL and MySQL. While a couple of benchmarks are not conclusive evidence, it can be assumed that FreeBSD will once again be a serious performance contender. Some posters on LWN have noted that the level of Linux performance could be related to the Completely Fair Scheduler, which was merged into the 2.6.23 Linux kernel.”
There has since been an update trying to prove that Linux is faster –
Update: 03/06 21:32 GMT by KD : An anonymous reader sent in word that Linux kernel developer Nick Piggin reran the benchmark today and came to a different conclusion: In his benchmark Linux was faster than FreeBSD.
But whoever the winner, the performance is clearly much, much better than before.
