FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status

[Dmitri Nikulin]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:
> Bill Hacker wrote:
>
>  > Kris,
>  >
>  > w/r the http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html page
>  >
>  > The link to the MySQL config:
>  >
>  > http://www.freebsd.org/%7Ekris/scaling/my.cnf
>  >
>  > ...gives me a 404.
>
>  Thanks, fixed.
>
>
>  > I don't have even a Quad-core I can spare from duty at the moment, but
>  > I'd like to at least see what the relative UMP & dual-core results are
>  > on one of the OpenSolaris releases we have handy.
>  >
>  > Solaris-on-x86 subjectively seems relatively faster now than 'SlowLaris'
>  > days, but still no great shakes speed-wise.
>
>  I don't know how well UP will perform, but Solaris have put enormous
>  amounts of work into their SMP implementation.  One thing we found in
>  FreeBSD is that SMP optimization work often also ends up improving UP
>  performance at the same time, so the results may be surprising.
>
>  I hope to rerun my benchmarks on an 8-core system soon (the trick has
>  been getting Solaris netbooted).

Hi Kris,

Do you think you'd have a chance to load up Windows Server on the same
machine and compare its MySQL and PostgreSQL to modern Linux, FreeBSD
and Solaris?

That's probably asking a lot, but I'm sure I'm not the only person
interested in seeing how Windows' latest kernels perform for server
roles. I just hope that, in such a benchmark, the userland software
implementation is fair to the platform, and not degenerating to
low-performance APIs from lack of optimisation.

There's a lot of debate about the use of FreeBSD and Linux and others
for servers, and personally I'm just happy to have so much choice
available to optimise per project. But it'd be really great to know
where Windows fits in the performance competition, and it's nice to
have some numbers to point to when arguing that free operating systems
outperform proprietary ones.

-- 
Dmitri Nikulin

Centre for Synchrotron Science
Monash University
Victoria 3800, Australia