A Performance Comparison of UNIX Operating Systems on the Pentium

This paper evaluates the performance of three popular versions of the UNIX operating system on the x86 architecture: Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. We evaluate the systems using freely available micro- and application benchmarks to characterize the behavior of their operating system services. We evaluate the currently available major releases of the systems "as-is," without any performance tuning.

Our results show that the x86 operating systems and system libraries we tested fail to deliver the Pentium's full memory write performance to applications. On small-file workloads, Linux is an order of magnitude faster than the other systems. On networking software, FreeBSD provides two to three times higher bandwidth than Linux. In general, Solaris performance usually lies between that of the other two systems.

Although each operating system out-performs the others in some area, we conclude that no one system offers clearly better overall performance. Other factors, such as extra features, ease of installation, or freely available source code, are more convincing reasons for choosing a particular system.