Debian Wheezy GNU/kFreeBSD: Slower Than Linux

[allquixotic]

Probably because BSD does not get as much attention and developers when it comes to the parts Michael tested, and thus those parts are not as optimized on the BSD-side as on the Linux-side.

Or the BSD kernel itself is inherently slower than Linux?

Wouldn't surprise me; there's been a ridiculous amount of investment in Linux lately. Sure, you can't just fix any problem by throwing money at it, but at least in computer science, you can develop new algorithms with really impressive average and worst-case performance. I know they're very careful about algorithm selection and use in the Linux kernel, and that's one of the main areas where Linux beats out pretty much everyone.

Since these tests mainly benchmark CPU based operations, this comes as no surprise that Linux would be faster. It has an amazing scheduler; BSD doesn't.

These benchmarks aren't testing I/O performance (disk) or GPU performance, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I'll bet that Linux is still faster for GPU performance, but it remains to be seen how they'd stack up on the disk I/O front. I'm not so confident that Linux would take the cake there, because ext4 at least is pretty slow in some of the tests we've run on it. It's a pretty lopsided filesystem: some tests, it performs amazingly well; others, it falls down completely. I'd actually want to see how XFS stands up against BSD's filesystem (ZFS, I guess). XFS is not going to blow you away with amazing numbers in any one test, but it's designed so that it pretty much can't get into a horrible worst-case performance scenario... so you aren't going to see it performing at only 10% the speed of ZFS on any of the benchmarks, either. It'll be right up there with it, and occasionally excelling.

[Xake]

I see a pattern emerging, it seems consistent for BSD to be a little slower than Linux

Probably because BSD does not get as much attention and developers when it comes to the parts Michael tested, and thus those parts are not as optimized on the BSD-side as on the Linux-side.

[disi]

I see a pattern emerging, it seems consistent for BSD to be a little slower than Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Wheezy GNU/kFreeBSD: Slower Than Linux

With Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" set to be frozen soon, I took the opportunity to run some new benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Debian OS variant using the FreeBSD kernel rather than Linux, to compare it to Debian GNU/Linux as well as Ubuntu Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD 9.0.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17524