I’ve been investigating FreeBSD as an alternative to Debian on some of my systems. I used it a couple of years ago, in version 5, and it was nice. Performance wasn’t an issue back then though, it was more of a case of getting applications installed an configured. Because I was happy with Debian and had no complaints, I really didn’t have any reason to shift. With Splunk eating my low end hardware though, I thought this would be a good oppurtunity.

There’s many forum threads out there dealing with the issue of Linux vs. FreeBSD, so I’m not going to cover the issues here. In these open source forums though, it’s cautionable to make sure you have the latest information. Many forum threads on this issue cite the bad SMP support / performance in FreeBSD when compared with Linux. Well that’s just hogwash since version 7. I found a really nice web article dealing with a comparison of BSD variants, and one of the issues it covers is the SMP performance of FreeBSD 7. I thought it would make a good graph to post

As you can see though, FreeBSD 7 certainly scales with SMP quite well.