Performance Tuning

In its default, out-of-the-box configuration, FreeBSD is optimized to work with low-end hardware and to be extremely safe and reliable. This means that under heavy demand load, the system in its default state will perform more poorly than similarly equipped Linux or Windows servers. FreeBSD isn’t an inferior platform; quite the contrary. Rather, it simply needs to be tuned for high-performance operation. The other platforms to which it’s compared tend to be optimized for high performance by default, to the exclusion of low-end hardware. Very few sites that run FreeBSD servers do so without tuning the system for higher performance.

Performance tuning involves several different areas of the system, some of which require kernel ...

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