Linux vs FreeBSD Disk I/O: Why Is FreeBSD Faster?

Debian
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@J_J_Sloan, some of the OpenZFS developers hang out and answer questions on Practical ZFS:

I would recommend trying your question over there.

For my own curiosity…

  1. Are the ARC settings matched between Linux and FreeBSD?
  2. Are the graphs of read, write, or a mixture?
  3. Are the tests being performed on the host, or are they being performed within a guest (virtual machine)?
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22

The arc figures differ, but in both cases they are the untouched default settings.

The dbench test creates, opens, reads, and writes files, the whole gamut

These tests were run on the bare metal in both cases.

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23

On the bright side, I’m seeing outstanding network performance on Linux, and FreeBSD, although also very good, hasn’t been able to match it in my testing so far.

For instance, my Mailguard web portal is a modest VM, running apache and php-fpm on Debian 13 in 2 GB RAM, and I am seeing close to 100,000 requests/second across the lan with small files, using apachebench.

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