The day has come...

FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... so well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL.

Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more.

Networking

It seems network performance is much better in 7.0!

Andre Oppermann: In general it can be said that the FreeBSD 7.0 TCP stack is three to five times faster (either in increased speed where not maxed out, or reduced CPU usage). It is no problem to fill either 1 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s links to the max.

How did you reach these results?

Andre Oppermann: Careful analysis and lots of code profiling.

What type of improvements would TCP socket buffers auto-sizing offer? In which context would this feature show its best result?

Full Article Here