Spent some time in FreeBSD this weekend

[cardinals_fan]

I am no BSD community expert but it seems like majority of the good-quality help is concentrated on mailing lists. Also, things haven't really changed much in BSD-land for a longer period of time and googling tends to yield very relevant info. The FreeBSD handbook, which I forgot to mention in my review, is definitely ON TOP of my likes list!

The mailing lists are the location of most support action. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have fabulous manuals.

[jdong]

Ok, a quick example of the differences I'm seeing in an everyday task: At dinner a silly question came up of how many times the word "nazi" shows up in my e-mails. So, instead of approaching it hypothetically, I whipped out a terminal on my Hardy box and typed grep -Ri nazi Mail | wc -l.

Then I remembered I still have a BSD VM set up on the same box, so why not give that a try too? So I SSH'ed into the FreeBSD VM and typed the same thing. Given virtualization overhead, I expected certainly that Ubuntu would respond first with my answer. To my surprise, FreeBSD finished first, by a considerable margin! Shocked at this result, I attempted to time both of them with the time command, taking 5 samples and reporting the minimum. Here's the best runs:

# FreeBSD 7-STABLE

[jdong@wormhole ~]$  time grep -Ri nazi Mail | wc -l 
grep: warning: Mail/.Inbox: recursive directory loop
     315

real	1m17.137s
user	0m3.779s
sys	0m14.692s

# Hardy
[jdong@jdong:~]$ time grep -Ri nazi Mail | wc -l                  (04-22 20:55)
grep: warning: Mail/.Inbox: recursive directory loop

315
grep -Ri nazi Mail  184.98s user 7.61s system 81% cpu 3:57.66 total
wc -l  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 3:57.66 tota

Ubuntu took over two times longer and yielded the same result. Now I understand that FreeBSD has a different grep implementation than Linux, but frankly I don't care for this purpose -- I wanted to know how many times a word shows up in my e-mail and FreeBSD answered that question first. Even inside a VM with only 128MB RAM while Ubuntu had the rest of the 2GB RAM native.


Now this is a very limited example microbenchmark, but it definitely contributes to the general gut feeling I have that FreeBSD is "snappier"

UPDATE:

If that's not sick enough, I decided to test multitasking: In simultaneous SSH sessions I issued a grep command each against the same directory but for different words, simulating multitasking workloads on similar datasets (which I expect the CPU and IO schedulers to have some leeway in optimizing). Pasted are the results one after another, but understand that they ran in parallel on the actual test:

#FreeBSD

[jdong@wormhole ~]$  time grep -Ri nazi Mail | wc -l 
grep: warning: Mail/.Inbox: recursive directory loop
     315

real	1m22.114s
user	0m4.693s
sys	0m10.446s
[jdong@wormhole ~]$ time grep -Ri jdong Mail | wc -l
grep: warning: Mail/.Inbox: recursive directory loop
   58094

real	1m21.615s
user	0m2.879s
sys	0m9.935s


#Linux
[jdong@jdong:~]$ time grep -Ri nazi Mail | wc -l                  (04-22 21:03)
grep: warning: Mail/.Inbox: recursive directory loop

315
grep -Ri nazi Mail  173.90s user 4.47s system 70% cpu 4:11.32 total
wc -l  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 4:11.32 total
[jdong@jdong:~]$ time grep -Ri jdong Mail | wc -l                 (04-22 20:59)
grep: warning: Mail/.Inbox: recursive directory loop

58191
grep -Ri jdong Mail  171.29s user 6.02s system 70% cpu 4:10.44 total
wc -l  0.01s user 0.02s system 0% cpu 4:10.44 total

Even though FreeBSD only had one virtualized core while Ubuntu was allowed both CPU cores (and used both cores fully throughout the test), FreeBSD was able to service the requests faster than Ubuntu.

Note also that the average grep time from single to multi threaded for FreeBSD increased from 1:17->1:22 while for Linux increased from 3:57 to 4:11... The latter result doesn't make sense to me because FreeBSD barely suffered a hit even though it was limited to one core while Ubuntu used both cores but suffered a bigger proportional hit!

[cardinals_fan]

Doesn't really surprise me; FreeBSD has felt faster than any Linux distro to me, and Ubuntu isn't an especially fast distro anyway.

[stream303]

Wow - great posts! I hate to admit this, but when I was first learning *nix, I didn't know vi and was struggling with Yggdrasil.

I switched to FreeBSD, and when I found the EE editor, (or was it AE included by default for mere mortals, I was hooked.)

Of course I now know enough vi to be comfortable, but even then I was amazed at how fast the userland utils seemed to be compared to Linux, or for that matter open or netbsd.

I don't have the guts yet to put it on my PPC box, now that freebsd has that port available.. Why did you have to post this - freebsd is calling me again...

[thisllub]

Even though FreeBSD only had one virtualized core while Ubuntu was allowed both CPU cores (and used both cores fully throughout the test), FreeBSD was able to service the requests faster than Ubuntu.

I don't really think that is a good test for a number of reasons.
The host had to run both processes so it was much busier. Whenever the VM had CPU cycles they would mostly have been used for the task at hand.

I have FreeBSD and ARCH on this machine so I will try some tests and report back.

[klange]

If your graphics drivers are working, go compile Compiz-Fusion, it should run fine on FreeBSD.

[jdong]

I don't really think that is a good test for a number of reasons.
The host had to run both processes so it was much busier. Whenever the VM had CPU cycles they would mostly have been used for the task at hand.

I have FreeBSD and ARCH on this machine so I will try some tests and report back.

Well, while testing the host I intentionally left the virtual machine idle. Definitely in a 1-thread test it would have been strongly in favor of FreeBSD because KVM virtualization (the last available benchmarks) shows around 10% overhead on a "make world" test.

[Sporkman]

I tried running DesktopBSD in virtualbox last night - it installed fine, but afterwords kept crashing when starting it up... Maybe it's because I installed the 32 bit version but my hardware is 64 bit (AMD turion64)...

Meh. I'll try Nexenta next...

[jdong]

I tried running DesktopBSD in virtualbox last night - it installed fine, but afterwords kept crashing when starting it up... Maybe it's because I installed the 32 bit version but my hardware is 64 bit (AMD turion64)...

Meh. I'll try Nexenta next...

It's probably, actually, VirtualBox. I had a lot of trouble running VirtualBox and FreeBSD together, getting unexplained guest soft-locks (CPU spins but whole userland is frozen while compiling packages), network not working (must downgrade to 10MBit NIC emulation), and even one host kernel panic.

[Sporkman]

It's probably, actually, VirtualBox. I had a lot of trouble running VirtualBox and FreeBSD together, getting unexplained guest soft-locks (CPU spins but whole userland is frozen while compiling packages), network not working (must downgrade to 10MBit NIC emulation), and even one host kernel panic.

I figured as much, unfortunately I don't have a spare machine kicking around to do a real install.