DragonFlyBSD 5.4 & FreeBSD 12.0 Performance Benchmarks, Comparison Against Linux

For the first of the storage benchmarks was the very common SQLite test. Going from DragonFlyBSD 5.2 to 5.4 on HAMMER2 and from FreeBSD 11.2 to 12.0 on ZFS both yielded performance improvements, which are much welcome. In the case of DragonFlyBSD, its performance jump with DragonFlyBSD 5.4.0 is very dramatic and now even faster than the Linux distributions with EXT4/XFS, making us wonder if HAMMER2 is fully syncing to the disk as expected or something else adrift. In the case of FreeBSD, FreeBSD 12.0 with ZFS is now on-par with the CentOS 7 + XFS performance for this test.

In the CompileBench compile test, FreeBSD 12.0 was just ahead of Intel's Clear Linux platform with no change in performance between releases while DragonFlyBSD was much slower than the other operating systems tested.

In the other Compile Bench test, FreeBSD now dropped behind the Linux distributions (though not too far behind CentOS 7) while DragonFlyBSD's performance degraded even further. In this test it was a race between Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Clear Linux.

With BlogBench that simulates the workload of running a web server for a blog, the read performance on FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD were ahead of Ubuntu and Clear Linux but behind CentOS 7. In the case of the file write performance, FreeBSD 12.0 was much faster than FreeBSD 11.2 but not enough to beat out the Linux distributions while DragonFlyBSD 5.4 with HAMMER2 was the slowest.