PC-BSD 8.0 vs. Kubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

PC-BSD 8.0 was released last week and while we have already delivered FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks including against Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Fedora / Debian / OpenBSD / OpenSolaris for which PC-BSD is based, we took this opportunity to deliver a fresh set of *BSD benchmarks. In this article we have benchmarks of PC-BSD 8.0 x64 against Kubuntu 9.10 x86_64.

For this PC-BSD vs. Kubuntu benchmarking we used a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics processor. PC-BSD 8.0 is derived from FreeBSD 8.0 and as such it uses the FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p2 (x64) kernel, comes with KDE 4.3.5 installed by default, uses X.Org Server 1.6.5, comes with the NVIDIA 195.22 proprietary driver by default, arrives with GCC 4.2.1, and uses a UFS file-system. Meanwhile, Kubuntu 9.10 has the Linux 2.6.31 (x86_64) kernel, KDE 4.3.2, X.Org Server 1.6.4, GCC 4.4.1, and an EXT4 file-system. Each OS was left in its default configuration.

The Phoronix Test Suite is compatible with Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and *BSD systems (and limited Windows support too at this time) and as such we used our open-source automated testing framework for running today's tests.

Starting our PC-BSD vs. Kubuntu benchmarking with LAME MP3 encoding, the Canonical OS came out slightly ahead of PC-BSD, but not by a very sizable margin.

PC-BSD 8.0 actually beat out Kubuntu 9.10 when it came to the 7-Zip compression performance by 14%.

Compressing a 2GB test file was much quicker under Kubuntu 9.10 with the EXT4 file-system than PC-BSD 8.0 with UFS.