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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

I adore openbsd and have been using it since 4.x however it is still slow, not slow to boot or anything like that but if you run it as a web server it manages about half the req/s of Debian. Network performance is also slower than Debian if you're using it as a firewall (but I still prefer it as the syntax of PF is just perfect).

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It's gotten a lot faster with 7.6 (lots of work on the TCP stack iirc). We saw huge improvements in throughput after updating.

The new 7.8 release should bring some more performance, haven't tested it yet though.

Yes, they've been working on unlocking more and more performance over the 7.x series of releases if not longer.

Remember the BSDs date from an era when you only had one core in the CPU.

there's a lot of optimisations they don't engage with because it makes the code "ugly" but there's a larger one here, where they disable hyperthreading outright due to side-channel attacks.

Might be a leading cause of what you're seeing.

So, spin up lots of single-core VMs?

for I/O intensive applications, it's always been true that VMs are a decent chunk of overhead: https://sites.cc.gatech.edu/systems/projects/Elba/pub/JackLi...

Also, it's likely already in a VM.

> where they disable hyperthreading outright due to side-channel attacks.

You can turn on hyperthreading if you need/want it: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#SMT

It used to be faster than Linux for that, but that's been a while ago.

I moved some stuff away from OpenBSD when the release of Linux 2.4 implemented all missing firewall functionality - but kept others still due to the early issues with the 2.4 kernel. But by the time 2.5 was getting decent - roughly a year before the 2.6 release - in most cases just using Linux with a custom 2.5 kernel was the better option.

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