Building a new workstation - dual or quad-core CPU for FreeBSD 7?

[Kris Kennaway]

Karol Kwiatkowski wrote:
> Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>> Yes, 4BSD is still the default, although you definitely want to use
>>> ULE for performance reasons (NB: only on 7, dont use ULE on 6).  I
>>> don't know whether the release engineers plan to change that default,
>>> but I will check.
>> could you point to some URL/explain what's the actual difference.
> 
> You may want to check Jeff Roberson's blog site. Kris posted some graphs
> on his site, too. Since it's about CURRENT, some results might be
> outdated already.

Unfortunately my graphs are offline (the machine that was hosting them 
is being shipped trans-atlantically).  There is still a pdf in 
www.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling though.  It is slightly out of date: 
thesedays peak mysql performance is about 10-15% higher, with no scaling 
bottlenecks in the kernel on 8 CPUs (i.e. mysql itself is the only thing 
unable to scale to high loads due to bottlenecks and contention in the 
mysql userland code).  postgresql performance is about 20-25% higher too 
(and 50-60% better performance than mysql).  Some of these improvements 
come from work that will not be committed until after the 7.0 branch though.

Kris