D.5 OpenBSD

The results in this section are from OpenBSD Version 3.3 (released May 1, 2003). I built a kernel with the following notable configuration options:

option          MSGMNB=8192

option          MSGMNI=40

option          MSGSEG=512

option          MSGSSZ=64

option          MSGTQL=2048

option          SHMSEG=16

option          SHMMNI=32

option          SHMMAX=2048

option          SHMALL=4096

option          NMBCLUSTERS=32768

option          MAXFILES=8192

Table D-3 and Figure D-3 summarize the OpenBSD results. The choices for OpenBSD are similar to those for FreeBSD. Unfortunately, however, coss doesn't run on OpenBSD, which lacks the aio_read( ) and aio_write( ) functions.

Table D-3. OpenBSD benchmarking results
Storage scheme	Filesystem	Mount options	Throughput	Response time	Hit ratio
diskd(1)	UFS	async, noatime, softupdate	91.1	1.45	56.3
diskd(2)	UFS		63.7	1.44	56.2
ufs(1)	UFS	softupdate	27.6	1.51	56.3
ufs(2)	UFS	noatime	25.1	1.52	56.3
ufs(3)	UFS		22.7	1.52	56.1
ufs(4)	UFS	async	22.1	1.51	56.6

Figure D-3. OpenBSD filesystem benchmarking traces

In general, the OpenBSD results are slightly worse than FreeBSD. This isn't too surprising, given that the OpenBSD project emphasizes security and perhaps spends less time on filesystem performance.

One odd result is that using the async option (alone) caused a slight decrease in performance for the ufs storage scheme.