DragonFly faster than linux or FreeBSD?

[Rahul Siddharthan]

Steve Mynott wrote:
>Although, its not scientific and quite subjective I have had the
>distinct impression that both KDE (3.2.1) and Java (Native FreeBSD) are
>noticably faster on DragonFly than the other systems.
>
>ISTR someone on IRC [*] also saying they thought KDE was faster on
>DragonFly as well.
>
>The FreeBSD 5 result is perhaps no surprise but the Linux one was (maybe
>resulted from different KDE versions/graphic drivers).
>
>Can anyone confirm this?

It seems to me also that KDE starts up faster on DragonFly than on
Linux, on the same laptop.  But it's just a subjective impression.

However, anything involving heavy disk-writing activity -- untarring a
large tarball, for example -- slows down DragonFly a lot.  (I think
this happened with FreeBSD 4 too, but my subjective impression is it's
worse with DragonFly, even though I ran FreeBSD 4 on an older and much
slower laptop.)  Basically, when doing a lot of disk writing, audio
playback skips a lot, sometimes the mouse pointer or keyboard typing
lock up briefly, or clicking on an icon (even something simple and
quick like an xterm) has a very delayed effect, and so on.  Linux
seems to behave much more smoothly.  I never get audio skips unless
some runaway program is eating memory and the system is swapping a
lot.  It may be due to the preemptible kernel, but that should then
slow down an untarring process, and I don't notice a remarkable
slowdown there either.

Rahul