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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

>marginally worse performance

What benchmarks are you people talking about?

I'm thinking of a few Phoronix benchmarks I've seen through the years. I'm not going to pretend like these benchmarks are the be all and end all, but I do think it (at the very minimum) compares run-times for common tasks.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=comet-la...

In general, Linux comes out on top, FreeBSD follows, and Dragonfly takes third place. In some instances, Dragonfly beats out FreeBSD, but only just. The overall mean is that Dragonfly is only sightly worse than FreeBSD.

Again, not advocating for using phoronix benchmarks like it proves anything, but I think these results make sense.

I somehow suspected so. These are terribly poorly chosen benchmarks.

They test compilers, which tend to be older on BSDs; They are more conservative with updating them.

They seldom if at all test SMP scalability, parallel io, network throughput and latency or even scheduler latency. That is where the meat is.

It's hard to reliably reproduce a cross-platform benchmark. They use different compilers, different compiler flags and do not show profiles. Also some compilers tend to be quite conservative in less-known environments.

http://www.brendangregg.com/ActiveBenchmarking/bonnie++.html provides an example how "the same benchmark" can measure a different thing on a different platform.

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