Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD Gigabit & 10GbE Networking Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 25 January 2019 at 09:38 AM EST. Page 2 of 5. 15 Comments.

First up are the Mellanox 10GbE network benchmarks followed by the Gigabit tests.

Gigabit Linux vs. FreeBSD vs. Windows Network Benchmarks

Up first was iPerf3 with a single TCP test where Debian 9.6, Scientific Linux 7, and Ubuntu 18.04 all performed about the same speed and for the EL7/Ubuntu mlnx_tune'd results, there was no difference for this particular test. Ubuntu 18.10 was performing noticeably slower than the other Linux distributions, which ended up falling behind FreeBSD 12.0. Windows Server 2019 meanwhile was by far the slowest operating system under the iPerf3 network benchmark.

Gigabit Linux vs. FreeBSD vs. Windows Network Benchmarks

When it came to running the iPerf3 TCP test in parallel, with five concurrent tests the operation was a different story for the non-Linux platforms. Windows Server 2019 now had a slight lead over the other operating systems tested while FreeBSD 12 was in line with the fastest Linux distributions. But the Ubuntu 18.10 performance still ended up being much slower than the other Linux distributions, even after deploying the Mellanox driver package and running the mlnx_tune script for high throughput.

Gigabit Linux vs. FreeBSD vs. Windows Network Benchmarks

When running the TCP benchmark with 20 tests in parallel, Windows Server 2019 continued with a slight advantage over the Linux distributions and FreeBSD 12.0 was on par with the Linux distributions except for Ubuntu 18.10 still being well behind.

Gigabit Linux vs. FreeBSD vs. Windows Network Benchmarks

With the Nuttcp network benchmark, Windows Server 2019 had a slight lead over the Linux distributions while FreeBSD 12.0 was just a bit slower than the Linux distributions, except for Ubuntu 18.10 that was still showing a significant hit to performance compared to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.


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