Linux Distributions vs. BSDs With netperf & iperf3 Network Performance

With the UDP test of iperf3, the Linux distributions weren't seeing much of a change in performance. With the 100Mbit objective and five parallel processes, the BSD performance was very close to that of the Linux distributions. But with the 1000 Mbit objective and parallel count set to 5, the FreeBSD 11.0 performance dropped significantly behind the Linux distributions while those Linux distributions saw around the same performance. With the 1000Mbit objective, DragonFlyBSD 4.6 wasn't running reliably thus no results there.

With the TCP testing, there was barely any difference between the tested platforms with the operating systems not getting in the way.

Clear Linux ships with aggressive CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS by default and other optimizations, thus generally performing on top in most of our out-of-the-box Linux benchmarks, but for most of these network tests it appears it doesn't have much of an advantage currently in these network tests.

The netperf results, however, are much more interesting overall.