On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Alwin Meschede wrote:
Although I'm a copyleft kind of guy, I with this. In my experience, FreeBSD has been more stable and performed better under high load.
Even compared against the new Linux 2.6? With the new scheduler and overhauled IP-Stack, Linux 2.6 performs much better under load than Linux 2.4. On the two servers I maintain, 2.6 has improved the network performance to a measurable degree. Maybe we should give it a try on some of the soon-to-be-purchased machines...
There's are some interesting benchmarks comparing (among others) Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 5.0 (I think):
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
This seems to imply that you're correct in thinking 2.6 is more on level with FreeBSD in performance under load. I still feel Linux is not mature enough (who knows if 2.6 is stable, 2.4 certainly had a tendency not to be) to compare to FreeBSD here.
Still, the difference is insignificant compared to the work already sunk into the GNU/Linux base of Wikipedia. I agree that the easiest way to get some free performance (but not perhaps stability) is to just switch to 2.6.
-- Daniel