"I'd like to send a small update on my progress on the Performance Tracker project," noted Erik Cederstrand on the FreeBSD -current mailing list. He continued, "I now have a small setup of a server and a slave chugging along, currently collecting data. I'm following CURRENT and collecting results from super-smack and unixbench." The project performs regular benchmarks of the FreeBSD -current source tree using Unixbench and Super Smack, allowing you to chart the results over time. Erik highlighted an example of a visible change in performance when the generic kernel moved from the 4BSD scheduler to the ULE scheduler on October 19th, 2007.

Kris Kennaway responded favorably, then noted, "one suggestion I have is that as more metrics are added it becomes important for an 'at a glance; overview of changes so we can monitor for performance improvements and regressions among many workloads." He went on to suggest, "at some point the ability to annotate the data will become important (e.g. 'We understand the cause of this, it was r1.123 of foo.c, which was corrected in r1.124. The developer responsible has been shot.")" Erik agreed with both recommendations, and noted that he would continue to work in that direction.

Andrew Doran posted some threading benchmark results to NetBSD's tech-kern mailing list, following up to some benchmarks he'd posted earlier. The results compared NetBSD -current with FreeBSD -current, and the Linux 2.6.21 kernel. Kris Kennaway was surprised by the results, and ran his own benchmarks with minimal configuration changes, summarizing, "this measurement shows that FreeBSD is performing 70-80% better than NetBSD in this 4 CPU configuration. This is in contrast to Andrew's findings which seem to show NetBSD performing 10% better than FreeBSD on a 4 CPU system (a very old one though)." He added, "the drop-off above 8 threads on FreeBSD is due to non-scalability of mysql itself. i.e. it comes from pthread mutex contention in userland."

Kris ran additional benchmarks with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, showing much improved scalability above 8 threads, "postgresql is much more scalable than mysql on this workload and doesn't have silly scaling bottlenecks inside the application (cf the tail of the FreeBSD curve for mysql which is where pthread mutex contention kicked in)." He continued his testing, and found that on older 4CPU P3 hardware NetBSD did outperform FreeBSD, "but only by 3-4% (in particular I am not seeing the ~10% difference that Andrew observes on his 4*p3 700MHz). Given the age of the hardware and the fact that I am not seeing it on other workloads or on modern hardware it might just be due to a small scheduling difference on this configuration."