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Comment by SomeoneFromCA | Hacker News Reader

I recently booted old (Freebsd 12) VM and was surprised how _much_ more performant (vs debian) its tcp stack is, even when just browsing.

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I somehow have a hard time believing that you can feel the performance of the tcp stack while browsing of all things in a VM, are you sure it can be attributed to that?

Yes, I also have same hard time believing in it, but internet felt snappier.

Sounds more likely that your OS just had less things going on and your browser not as many extensions running as your daily driver browser.

No, not really. I have many old Linux VMs too, with different degree of rot, and FreeBSD has noticeable smaller tcp connection establishment latency. Youtube opens way faster than on both older and newer linux vms.

The issue is that you're performing a test which involves a whole bunch of interconnected layers and then assigning one part of that interconnected system as where the benefits lie.

Why not the TLS implementation? The video drivers and their kernel interfaces? The OS' process scheduling? A dozen other things that might be responsible for the perceived performance difference to one degree or another?

It feels like gamers who blame 90% of multiplayer issues on "the netcode".

It'd be different with data looking specifically at TCP connection establishment timing without a bunch of other stuff involved.

You are being too pedantic. Treat what I said as anecdote.

We don't question your feeling, just your hypothesis. Actually you made me want to try a BSD again, it's been a while.

It was the tcp stack. Only possible reason.

I had this experience recently and realised I had crippled my day to day system with a slow DNS resolver. Suddenly everything was snappy.

Huh...may need to check.

Yeah, slow DNS can look like a slow connection, but there are some subtle differences. images/elements will pop differently than if it's just a slow connection.

Had a wicked issue where a firewall was inspecting DNS requests and causing them to take almost 10 seconds to complete. Was hell on the SIP phones, and browsing the Internet was... Interesting.

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