Benchmarking Wine 1.1.2 on FreeBSD 7.0

"I installed some benchmarks into Wine 1.1.2 on FreeBSD and gave them another run today to see what gains I would see over the last benchmarks that I ran. The last time the benchmarks were run on FreeBSD 7.0 Beta 2 and Nvidia driver Version: 100.14.19 that was edited so it would install and run on FreeBSD 7 bets 2."

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Speed Testing the Latest Web Browsers

Read the hype on every new web browser released or due out this year, and you'll see claims that every one of them is "faster" than all the others. You could compare super-specific tests and decipher all the code-brain terminology, and you'd still be left wondering which browser starts quicker, uses less memory, and slides through dynamic interfaces like Gmail the fastest. Since our squadron of independent analysts had the week off, we ran the latest editions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera 9.5, and Safari for Windows through some unscientific but highly geeky tests ourselves on a plain old Windows computer. Take a look at the full (and somewhat unexpected) results after the jump.

FreeBSD 7.0 Bests Linux In SMP Performance

"After major improvements in SMP support in FreeBSD 7.0, benchmarks show it performing 15% better than the latest Linux kernels on 8 CPUs under PostgreSQL and MySQL. While a couple of benchmarks are not conclusive evidence, it can be assumed that FreeBSD will once again be a serious performance contender."

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Practical (and impractical) PHP Optimizations

I've been seeing a lot of articles popping up lately about PHP Optimizations, particularly within the code (rather than the configuration, server, caching, etc) that I have some nitpicks with.

My position remains the same: Unless your code is running incredibly slow, you've found every single bug you can possibly find without having nightmares about unit tests, or an optimization that makes more than a 10% improvement in speed (factoring in your margin of error,) don't bother. That said, let's down to brass tacks.

Each test is run 1000 times and the execution time is averaged over two different ways of achieving the same results. Execution times are rounded to millionths of a second, and taken using microtime. The server is running Ubuntu 7.10 server with PHP 5.2.3-1 and Apache 2, and will not have anything else open to keep the margin of error as low as possible. To be on the safe side, my margin of error (between doing this for years, and my guesstimate after running countless hours of benchmarks) is about 15% +/-.

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FreeBSD 7.0 beats Linux in multi-core systems

Two years have past since FreeBSD came out with a new version, but don’t think that the development has halted just because of this long period. Soon it’s time for the launch of FreeBSD 7.0 which offers ton of new things. According to tests performed by FreeBSD, the new version will beat Linux when it comes to multi-core systems.

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MySQL performance tuning

This document serves as a starting point for MySQL performance tuning. This document is a combination of research and experience. When I started this document, I utilized a great Google video [1] as a reference for the document structure and many bullet items. I would suggest watching this video. I then filled in a few blanks, and combined a few other articles into this overview.

Threading Benchmarks, NetBSD versus FreeBSD

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."

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The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed

ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies.

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Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ

Compared to an operating-system-level virtualization technology like OpenVZ, Xen — a hypervisor-level virtualization technology that allows multiple operating systems to be run with and without para-virtualization — trades off performance for much better isolation and security. OpenVZ's performance advantage due to running virtual containers in a single operating system kernel can be significant. A performance evaluation study (PDF) done by researchers at the University of Michigan and HP labs provides insight into how big a performance penalty Zen pays and what causes the overheads (primarily L2 cache misses).

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MySQL mejora con 8 núcleos en FreeBSD

Continúa el trabajo para mejorar la performance de MySQL en FreeBSD, bastante cuestionada anteriormente. Esta vez, la gente del proyecto ya está reportando que recientemente se hicieron "progresos significativos" en optimizar MySQL en un sistema AMD64 de 8 núcleos bajo FreeBSD 7.0.

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