Benchmarks For Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD

Ashmash writes "After their Mac OS X versus Ubuntu benchmarks earlier this month, Phoronix.com has now carried out a performance comparison between Ubuntu 8.10, OpenSolaris 2008.11 and FreeBSD 7.1. They used a dual quad-core workstation with the Phoronix Test Suite to run primarily Java, disk, and computational benchmarks. The 64-bit build of Ubuntu 8.10 was the fastest overall, but FreeBSD and OpenSolaris were first in other areas."

What about the Sun Studio compiler?

[aliquis]

Various versions of GCC. While one could argue that the compiler is part of the OS it's indeed replaceable so I would had prefered if they had used the same version of GCC and not different for each OS.

It would had been very interesting to see the Solaris results using Sun Studios CC as well (I think it's also available for Linux nowadays?)

Re:Ubuntu may be fast...

[jgtg32a]

dammit so /. decided to eat my good post so I'll just leave the quick and dirty instead. This is why /boot gets its own partition, it lets you remove things very easily, and adding them is simple as well.

Re:Right.

[Thelasko]

Even with all that extra 'default' weight Ubuntu still shines on except when running, eh, Java.

From my personal, and non-scientific experience, I've found OpenSolaris to have more 'default' weight than Ubuntu.

Re:Ubuntu performance

[Hatta]

These days a full install of Ubuntu, with all it's bells and whistles is going to be slower than a bare install of XP. The nice thing is that you don't need all that cruft, and it's pretty easy to install a command line system and add things as needed. Use a lightweight WM or desktop like fluxbox or XFCE and you're set.

Re:Right.

[TheRaven64]

If they wanted a good comparison of what a user sees, they should have used a release version of all operating systems, instead of a release of Ubuntu, a release candidate of Solaris and a beta of FreeBSD. I don't know about Solaris release candidates, but FreeBSD betas come with a lot of extra stuff in libc and the kernel turned on that make tracking issues easier at the expense of speed. Most end users will not be running betas, they will be running the latest stable release.

Mostly pointless

[klapaucjusz]

Except for Bonnie++, all of their benchmarks are compute-bound. In other words, they're benchmarking the bundled compiler, not the distribution.

The one exception is Bonnie++, on page 6, which measures raw filesystem performance... and is something that is known to greatly depend on how old and how full a given filesystem is.

Re:Right.

[CAIMLAS]

It's kind of crazy how so many benchmark reviews completely overlook actual use and go for one or two "bullet list" type qualifiers for their benchmarks. Granted, I understand this is mainly in the interest of page hits and ad revenue, and by making it controversial they increase those things, but c'mon. Benchmarks are supposed to be pragmatic, and in order to be pragmatic, they have to operate at or near userland conditions, considering CPU, bus, memory and network speed, and the like - as they pertain to the user (whether the user is a hosting company or a desktop end user).

It seems like a pretty trivial matter to do something like this. Say, use something like MySQL for starters - it's available for a dozen or so systems (major Linux distros, OS X, Windows, etc.) It's also typically offered by the vendor, so you'd be able to get an 'ideal' setup for each release.

Or, how about something like a "Firefox benchmark" as that's user-applicable and can use all hardware. Time how long it takes to start FF on all systems with, say, 50 tabs running.

Or how about a straight-up media playing benchmark for 2D performance? Launch a dozen or so DivX videos at once and see how well it performs: measure CPU load, memory use, and the time it takes for FF to start up completely.

Or how about lengthy disk access (maybe crawling a storage tree or such) and measure the time it takes, as well as the amount of memory which gets cached for the process?

This benchmark, as well as most others, seem pretty trivial and useless, and not all that well thought out. They're certainly not scientific!

Re:Kernel Architecture would offer same prediction

[styrotech]

If you look at Linux, with its microkernel heritage...
....Also if you look at a classic monolithic kernel design (even with Apple duct tape) the OS X kernel....
...even Apple has done well with putting bandaids on the monolithic nature of BSD/MACH...

Linux is a microkernel? Mach is monolithic? Since when?

...In fact, every kernel architecture compared in these tests and OS X where deemed to be too primative for even the MS NT team back in 1990...
...and architecture that MS chose to use and abandon the 'in use' kernel concepts of 1990 and instead build NT around kernel technologies that were nothing but a group of theories at the time.

As for NT being a completely new design, it started off as a pretty standard microkernel with an awful lot of its design inspired by (some cynics might even say copied from) VMS and RSX-11 which are roughly the same vintage as Unix, and NT later became more of a hybrid incorporating some monolithic aspects for performance reasons. NT wasn't anywhere near as new or theoretical as you make it sound, it was based on tried and true ideas which is just as well for MS.