Initial Benchmarks Of OpenBSD 6.4, DragonFlyBSD 5.3, FreeBSD vs. Linux

First up was the basic yet important SQLite performance test considering how widespread this embedded database library is used by applications. Arguably most surprising was the DragonFlyBSD performance improvement in going slower than the Linux distributions to now being the fastest with the current development release, likely due to all of the ongoing HAMMER2 file-system work. OpenBSD 6.4 was in second place with its FFS file-system. also surprising. FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 2 was running slightly faster than FreeBSD 11.2 stable with its ZFS file-system configuration on this NVMe solid-state storage.

With the BlogBench I/O benchmark that tries to represent a web server workload serving a blog, FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD surprisingly came out ahead of Ubuntu and Clear Linux. DragonFlyBSD 5.3 shows another significant boost in performance over 5.2 stable. By far the fastest in this read benchmark though was Fedora Server 29, the margins by which Fedora Server is faster is quite shocking though it is the only one of those tested defaulting to the XFS file-system. It will be interesting to to run this test on some other systems to see if it reproduces across the board.

The write test was a very different story with the BSDs and Fedora Server now much slower than Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

With the CompileBench tests, Clear Linux and Ubuntu were among the fastest. FreeBSD on ZFS was running the fastest of the BSDs.