FreeBSD 14.0 Is Delivering Great Performance Uplift & Running Well In Early Tests

Following last week's release of FreeBSD 14.0, I've begun testing out this major FreeBSD operating system update on a number of servers. What's clear so far is the performance being much improved with FreeBSD 14.0 on modern x86_64 Intel/AMD servers over FreeBSD 13.

FreeBSD 14.0 is a big update with much improved hardware support, upping the ARM64 and AMD64 CPU limit up to 1024 CPU cores over the prior 256 limit, upgraded LLVM Clang toolchain, updated OpenZFS file-system support, and an assortment of other additions.

I've been testing FreeBSD 14.0 out on a few AMD and Intel servers so far and the results have been looking consistently great. In this initial article is looking at the FreeBSD 13.2 vs. FreeBSD 14.0 performance on an AMD EPYC 8534P 64-core Zen 4C "Siena" server.

The 64-core / 128-thread server with 192GB of RAM and Micron 7450 Max 3.2TB NVMe SSD was kept the same throughout with the only change between tests being clean installs of FreeBSD 13.2 and then FreeBSD 14.0.

With simply the newer underlying OS and keeping the applications (benchmarks) under test the same, FreeBSD 14.0 is looking very nice in the performance department.