Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD Gigabit & 10GbE Networking Performance

Ethr is the new network benchmark written by Microsoft engineers in Golang and is cross-platform. Unfortunately though this Golang network benchmark doesn't build cleanly on FreeBSD. With the Ethr TCP latency test in a single thread, we see the Mellanox auto-tuned performance delivering the best (and similar) performance on Ubuntu 18.10 and Scientific Linux 7. Windows Server 2019 meanwhile was very slow with only the default Scientific Linux 7 (EL7) stack on Linux 3.10 kernel coming in slower than it. Of the out-of-the-box Linux distribution tests, Debian 9.6 was the fastest.

With multiple threads, both 8 and 64 threads, the positioning was similar with the Mellanox scripted tuning still paying off and Windows Server 2019 being the second slowest only ahead of the default Scientific/EL stack.

With the TCP bandwidth test, Windows Server 2019 came out slightly ahead of the Linux distributions. Here the mlnx_tune script for the high throughput profile actually hurt the performance.

Meanwhile for the HTTP bandwidth test, the Mellanox tuning helped particularly on Scientific Linux 7 and less so on Ubuntu 18.10. Windows Server 2019 meanwhile was aligned with the out-of-the-box Linux distribution performance sans Ubuntu 18.10 that was still coming in on the low-end.