Category: diagrams and charts are great

Sepherosa Ziehau went to AsiaBSDCon 2017 and gave a talk on his work with DragonFly’s networking.  He’s published a report of his trip, which comes with a link to his paper, his presentation, and pictures of who he met.

Note that the PDF and the Powerpoint slides links are different; one is the paper, one is the talk.  The Powerpoint slides contain the benchmarks linked here in comments, previously.

In what can be described as perfect timing, Sepherosa Ziehau has produced a document comparing FreeBSD, several different Linux kernels, and DragonFly, for networking.  He’s presenting it in the afternoon track of Day 3 for AsiaBSDCon 2017, starting later this week.

He’s published a snippet as a PDF (via), which includes some graphs.    The one place Linux outperforms DragonFly seems to be linked to the Linux version of the network card driver being able to access more hardware – so DragonFly should be comparable or better there too, once the powers-of-2 problem is solved.  (This already came up in comments to a post last week.)

Those graphs are available standalone, too, which means it’s easier to see the fantastic performance for latency – see the thin blue line – that seems exclusive to DragonFly.   That, if anything, is the real takeaway; that DragonFly’s model has benefits not just to plain speed but to the system’s responsiveness under load.  “My CPU is maxed out cause I’m doing a lot of work but I hardly notice” is a common comment over the past few years – and now we can see that for network performance, too.