On 2/23/06, sai <sonicsai at gmail dot com> wrote:
> >
> > If I may ask, just for informative purposes, why is 4.x faster than 6.x? And how does multiproc
help/hinder?
>
> Seems the FreeBSD people thought that SMP was mort important (and
> current multicore cpus seem to prove them correct) and so SMP was
> focus of development after 4.x
> This reduced performance of the network stack.
> Andre Oppermann et al are now working on the network stack to improve
> performance.
>

that's correct.  a significant loss in network throughput (though it
isn't noticable unless you're pushing a lot of data through a
relatively slow proc), especially in firewalling scenarios, was an
unintended consequence of this.

It's to the point now in 6.0 where network throughput on SMP systems
is faster than the same system on 4.x.  For single proc, 6.x should
get closer to 4.x's speed than it is now, but it'll almost certainly
never match it.

-Chris