Debian Linux Benchmarked Against Debian GNU/kFreeBSD & FreeBSD

Turning to the Threaded I/O Tester and starting off with running 32 threads of 64MB writes, the fastest here was FreeBSD 8.0 when being run on the older hardware, but the fastest with the newer hardware was Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.3 followed right behind with GNU/kFreeBSD 8.0. Debian GNU/Linux on both notebooks ran right in the middle.

Lastly, we turned from 32 threads of 64MB continuous writes to the same thread count of random writes. Debian GNU/Linux with the EXT3 file-system was the undisputed winner with this test while the FreeBSD kernel and its default file-system were running at about half the speed.

Depending upon your local hardware configuration and the software that is relevant to you, the outcome as to what operating system is the fastest between Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and FreeBSD may vary. However, with these tests today on the two different Lenovo notebooks and testing both the 7.3 and 8.0 kernels from FreeBSD, the overall winner is Debian GNU/Linux. Debian GNU/Linux won the most tests in our original Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarking and it continues to be that way still when looking at the default configuration.

This though is not to say that FreeBSD is a loser in terms of computing performance against Linux, but FreeBSD did possess a stronger advantage with tests like C-Ray and some I/O operations. FreeBSD and the other *BSDs also have their own set of features and focus that distinguish them from Linux in other ways besides the quantitative performance.

You may share your results with us in the Phoronix Forums and the benchmarks can be easily reproduced in a fully automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite. Once Debian Squeeze is officially released with the Linux and FreeBSD kernels we, of course, will be back with more tests. Right now we are also running a new set of FreeBSD 8.1 benchmarks with the ZFS file-system and those results should be made available within the next week.