this 48-core box...

[Adrian Chadd]

.. just as a data point - there was a thread a while ago about numeric
processing performance on linux vs bsd.

It all boiled down to how jemalloc versus the linux allocator(s) allocate
blocks. jemalloc will page align things after a certain size. Linux didn't.
So when doing numeric processing, there was a lot of cache aliasing going
on leading to inefficient cache usage and redundant memory operations.

When the same workload on Linux was run on FreeBSD but with the Linux
library/allocators, the performance was identical.

No-one followed through. I think I may have to write a blog post about it.


-adrian