From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 6 16:28:30 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1C94716A4CE for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2005 16:28:30 +0000 (GMT) Received: from saturn.criticalmagic.com (saturn.criticalmagic.com [64.74.124.105]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2744643D2F for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2005 16:28:28 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from rcoleman@criticalmagic.com) Received: from [10.40.30.75] (borg.ciphertrust.com [64.238.118.66]) by saturn.criticalmagic.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8501D3BD21 for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2005 11:28:22 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <41DD6737.4090804@criticalmagic.com> Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 11:28:39 -0500 From: Richard Coleman Organization: Critical Magic User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (X11/20041230) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org References: <20050106115726.52478.qmail@web26608.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20050106115726.52478.qmail@web26608.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: Benchmark: NetBSD 2.0 beats FreeBSD 5.3 X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:28:30 -0000 Robert Ryan wrote: > Fellow FreeBSD developers, > > I hate to say I told you but it was inevitable. > > Check this out: http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/gmcgarry/ Well, even though this link was submitted by a troll, the benchmarks are actually pretty interesting and worth reading. Just keep the following in mind: 1. Although NetBSD did perform better on many of the benchmarks (kudos to them), but the difference is usually not dramatic. 2. The benchmarks are strictly uniprocessor benchmarks. 3. The author does admit at the end of the article that NetBSD still uses a big, giant lock around the kernel and the benchmarks might be very different on a multiprocessor system. 4. The benchmarks are only NetBSD versus FreeBSD, so it's hard to judge where the performance of each system fits in the grand scheme of things. It could be that both systems are performing very well. The benchmarks need to include at least one non-BSD system (usually Linux) in order to get some perspective. 5. It would have been nice if FreeBSD 4.10 and NetBSD 1.6.2 were also include, so we could see the relative progress (or lack) of each system. But it's worth reading. Data is always a good thing. Just don't get hung up on them. Hopefully, it will inspire more comprehensive tests. Richard Coleman rcoleman@criticalmagic.com