From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sun Aug 20 18:48:41 1995
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Date: Sun, 20 Aug 1995 18:48:39 -0700
From: John Dyson <dyson>
Message-Id: <199508210148.SAA01536@freefall.FreeBSD.org>
To: hasty@rah.star-gate.com, terry@cs.weber.edu
Subject: Re: Why Linux? (fwd)
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

I just did a competitive performance analysis of FreeBSD vs. Linux.  I
can't say that FreeBSD was the CLEAR winner, but it was much faster
in many key areas.  The only place that I can see that Linux is
architecturally faster is in the async filesystem stuff.  Generally,
FreeBSD's networking (TCP) is at least 50% faster.  FreeBSD's VM
stuff is much faster.  I cannot see where people say that Linux needs
less memory either.  I ran some memory loading benchmarks on FreeBSD and
Linux, where FreeBSD was a generic kernel and Linux was a "nice" subset
V1.3.20.  It appears that FreeBSD handles loads much better.  Also,
when running Linux I noticed an "old-friend" -- the bouncy SVR3 feel.
Things generally appear to run a bit slower on Linux, including sequential
file I/O.  I am sure that Linux can fix up these minor performance nits,
but it does seem to run ok.

I have results on request -- I just don't want to post them yet.  If there
is a big demand, I will though..

John
dyson@root.com