How well does OpenBSD scale?

[hanzer]

I've been thinking about upgrading my personal-use, home-network hardware - most of my equipment was acquired used about ten years ago. The capabilities of current hardware is a bit staggering. I'm wondering about the pros & cons of two different architectures:

1. A few small (desktop-class hardware) machines (a workstation, a NAS, a network services machine)
2. One large (server-class hardware) machine that does it all.

Often, large system performance metrics are based on a single application under heavy load. In my situation, there would be many [hundreds(?) of] applications/daemons, each under low load most of the time. Some of these might be large footprint (e.g., PostgreSQL), while others would be relatively low resource.

How well could OpenBSD utilize a six-core Xeon machine with 32GB of ECC RAM for my use-case? Would the GENERIC kernel need to be tweaked?

[jggimi]

Marc Espie studied large scale servers two years ago with a dpb(1) workload. His MP scaling report is here:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=139419359904798&w=2

It is specific to ports building. Thousands of ports. It wouldn't necessary translate to your intended workloads at all.

In the past couple of years, MP scaling has improved, in many areas. Particularly in some aspects of networking. But there is still work to be done.

(I use hyper-threading. Even when port building. Even though it may not be ideal for port building. Mostly, because I want to do other things while building ports.)