DragonFlyBSD 5.3 Offering Some Performance Improvements

Since the release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this past April there have been many improvements to this popular BSD operating system, including on the performance front. I recently wrapped up some fresh benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT for seeing what the performance is looking like in what will eventually be released as DragonFlyBSD 5.4.

A lot of recent DragonFlyBSD coverage has been around its support/optimizations for Threadripper 2 with lead DragonFlyBSD developer Matthew Dillon being a big fan of these new high-core count CPUs. In this article though tests are being done from an Intel Xeon "Skylake" CPU for looking at the performance work outside of that scope.

Among the work that has landed in DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT have been SMP performance improvements, improvements around Spectre/Meltdown, continuing to mature its homegrown HAMMER2 file-system, defaulting to the GCC 8 compiler over the old GCC5 previous default, and countless other tweaks large and small.

I used a DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT snapshot at the end of September and compared that to DragonFlyBSD 5.2 on the same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 system running with NVMe SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. All of these BSD benchmarks were facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite.