FreeBSD 8.0 Benchmarked Against Linux, OpenSolaris

Out of the 26 graphs shown in this article, how many times did FreeBSD 8.0 pull ahead of Linux / OpenSolaris? Just one. This win was with the C-Ray ray-tracing engine. However, in this test, it actually illustrates a performance regression where FreeBSD 7.2 was even faster than the newest 8.0 release. Between FreeBSD 7.2 and 8.0, the week-old operating system did offer nice performance improvements in a few areas like MAFFT. The real performance race though came down between the OpenSolaris 2010.02 development build (derived from b127) and Ubuntu 9.10 / Fedora 12.

OpenSolaris had a few wins over the Linux operating system when it came to lower CPU utilization during video playback, the compression tests (7-Zip / Gzip), and other areas. OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 though did have a few notable losses too. Later though we will be delivering more FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks, but atop a different file-system besides the default UFS, to see how this shakes up the results. Once NVIDIA releases their new FreeBSD driver we will also be able to test against the 64-bit version of FreeBSD. We will also be benchmarking Debian/kFreeBSD in the coming months too. Again, these test results today are to illustrate the "out of the box" performance encountered by most normal users.

We will be back with more benchmarks soon, but for now, you can share your thoughts in the Phoronix Forums, run your own Linux / Mac OS X / BSD / OpenSolaris benchmarks with the Phoronix Test Suite, and hit us up on Facebook, Twitter, or Identi.ca.