[Randux]

I just posted this on freebsd forums. I think there is a big difference even between the same OS on the same hardware depending on the OS architecture.

Hi,

I've been using all of the major BSD off and on for about 3 or 4 years. I just got some new boxes and needed a good desktop so I tried all the latest releases and I just about settled on FreeBSD AMD64 for this machine but after using it for a full day the performance feels really bad.

I know that saying the performance feels bad doesn't mean much so I ran some programs to try to quantify it.

I used rarcrack to brute force passwords against a rar archive with a long password. To me it's a good example of CPU throughput that doesn't use much memory. On a really slow Linux on the same box (openSUSE 11.1) I can test about 750 passwords per second. On the same archive on the same box running FreeBSD AMD64 it only processes 22 passwords a second. I don't understand how this can be happening.

I built ubench from ports and the results were:

Ubench CPU: 761518
Ubench MEM: 255535
--------------------
Ubench AVG: 508526

According to the list published on phystech these numbers look pretty good. But the system feels extremely sluggish (applications take forever to load) and there are other performance problems. Most of my downloads building ports die in the middle, it took me ages to get things built.

I don't have much disk space left on this box but I left a primary partition on one of the drives so I may try to install i386 again run ubench on that arch to see if it makes any difference.

Any ideas, fellas?

Cheers,
Randall