FreeBSD vs. Linux Scaling Up To 128 Threads With The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

The OpenSSL scaling performance was effectively the same across the three operating systems / four configurations tested.

When looking at the PostgreSQL database server across the varying core/thread configurations, CentOS Stream was the front-runner at 16 cores through 128 threads followed by Ubuntu 20.04 while FreeBSD 12.1 atop ZFS saw much less scaling.

Lastly is a look at the geometric mean for all of the benchmarks conducted for this FreeBSD vs. Linux scaling comparison on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X. In the end, both CentOS Stream and Ubuntu 20.04 (development) delivered similar performance and were basically tied for first. FreeBSD 12.1 performed well and in terms of LLVM Clang 8.0.1 (their default compiler) versus GCC 9, the GNU compiler tended to offer slightly better performance in these particular benchmarks on this AMD Zen 2 HEDT processor.

At 16 cores, RHEL8-based CentOS was about 17% faster than FreeBSD 12.1 while at 128 threads the lead expanded to 28% based upon the geometric mean or 21% when comparing the GCC9 results on FreeBSD 12.1. With these benchmarks and their varying multi-threaded abilities, when going from 16 to 128 threads on CentOS was 3.1x the performance while on FreeBSD 12.1 was 2.8x for both compilers. While CentOS and Ubuntu were offering slightly better performance, it's great to see in any case FreeBSD 12.1 running nicely out-of-the-box on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X with System76 Thelio Major.