From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Aug 13 16:15:19 1997
Return-Path: <owner-freebsd-questions>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA06083
          for questions-outgoing; Wed, 13 Aug 1997 16:15:19 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from alpo.whistle.com (alpo.whistle.com [207.76.204.38])
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA06077
          for <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>; Wed, 13 Aug 1997 16:15:14 -0700 (PDT)
Received: (from daemon@localhost)
	by alpo.whistle.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA02059;
	Wed, 13 Aug 1997 16:11:47 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from current1.whistle.com(207.76.205.22)
 via SMTP by alpo.whistle.com, id smtpd002056; Wed Aug 13 23:11:41 1997
Message-ID: <33F23EA0.4487EB71@whistle.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 16:09:20 -0700
From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
Organization: Whistle Communications
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Paul Dekkers <psd@worldaccess.nl>
CC: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: FreeBSD is slower than Linux !?
References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.970814003604.104A-100000@gromit.nev.ml.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Paul Dekkers wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> I did some speed tests and I'd like to hear some reaction about this.
> 
>         Linux   FreeBSD
> dd      2.61    4.95    dd if=/dev/zero of=/test bs=1024 count=5000
> gzip    12.50   11.01   gzip -9 test
> gunzip  3.86    8.12
> sync    4.21    0.9     -> So it seems FreeBSD writes everything to
>                            disk directly?! WHY? This makes FreeBSD
>                            much slower!
> unzips  4.45    41.92   decompress the sendmail distr
> compil  353.79  371.87  compile sendmail (makesendmail)
> 
> Yes, I used the same (slow) disk on my i486
> But I was really surprised discovering that FreeBSD is much slower in disk
> access than Linux, so why is the filesystem called FFS (fast-filesystem?!)
> ;-)
> 
> But, my main question -> I think FreeBSD is that slow because it writes
> everything to disk directly, without a good cache. Why is this like it is?
> This does not make FreeBSD very attractive for me to use as a fileserver
> (nfs or samba) or e.g. a mail server.

try:
mount -u -o async [filesystem]