PC-BSD 10.0 vs. PC-BSD 9.2 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 Benchmarks

After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.

The 64-bit releases of PC-BSD 9.2, PC-BSD 10.0, and Ubuntu 13.10 were tested on a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook with Intel Core i7 720QM processor, NVIDIA Quadro FX880M GPU, 4GB of system RAM, and a 160GB Fujitsu HDD.

All of the operating systems were cleanly installed and left using their default settings/packages, including their default file-systems, default compiler choices, etc, since they are all design choices made by the distribution vendor. This includes Clang 3.3 being used by default on PC-BSD 10.0, PC-BSD 10.0 defaulting to the ZFS file-system, etc. Benchmarking on Linux and FreeBSD/PC-BSD were handled via the Phoronix Test Suite for complete automation and reproducibility of the results.