Igor Shmukler wrote:

> About flaming. I am not a fan of publically humiliating anyone.
 > It's a wrong thing to do. In fact when the person who started this
> sent  an email to FreeBSD performance list I merely pointed out that
 > microbenmark != performance. It does not mean that NetBSD performs
 > worse than FreeBSD. In fact it is possible that NetBSD is better,
 > although I want to see a proof before such a statement could be made.

Did you read the conclusions of the paper?

"Microbenchmarks are not always the best indicators to make judgments on 
the overall performance of one operating system over another. However, 
they are useful to infer an understanding of the architectural decisions 
that go into building an operating system. For many applications, the 
results presented in the paper may never affect performance. For others, 
the scalability of the operating system may simply not permit the 
application to run suitably."

and

"Although NetBSD 2.0 has outperformed FreeBSD 5.3 in most of the 
benchmarks presented here, FreeBSD 5.3 has made significant developments 
with its symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) architecture, particularly in 
the area of scalability with fine-grained locking. NetBSD 2.0 continues 
to use a single lock to serialize access to kernel mode. Additionally, 
the performance of the thread implementation on multiprocessor systems, 
where thread concurrency can be achieved, would be worth investigating. 
Benchmarks for these areas are the objective of future research."


Cheers,

Dries