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Sunday September 30, 2007

Which free un*x for a database today?

The quest to be the fastest webserver or database server or whatever is no different to any other part of the IT market, with the leader constantly changing, depending on who's where with their current development cycle.

Over at one of the other open source projects that I'm involved with, NetBSD, some of the project members have been doing some testing with MySQL on some "older" SMP machines they have at their disposal.

The first graph shows NetBSD-current (the equivalent of "nevada" or OpenSolaris) against an earlier release of NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux.

After seeing the above graph, a few people (including myself) were curious about how NetBSD's performance stacked up against OpenSolaris - afterall, Solaris is *the* platform for people running production databases in many environments today. The results are quite surprising but very pleasing to the NetBSD project. (For details of the test and hardware used in the test below, see http://www.netbsd.org/~ober/