Update: This post has been updated to include Docker benchmarks and a comparison of container overhead versus FreeBSD Jails and illumos Zones.
I often get very specific infrastructure requests from clients. Most of the time it is some form of hosting. My job is usually to suggest and implement the setup that fits their goals, skills and long term plans.
If there are competent technicians on the other side, and they are willing to learn or already comfortable with Unix style systems, my first choices are usually one of the BSDs or an illumos distribution. If they need a control panel, or they already have a lot of experience with a particular stack that will clearly help them, I will happily use Linux and it usually delivers solid, reliable results.
Every now and then someone asks the question I like the least:
“But how does it perform compared to X or Y?”
I have never been a big fan of benchmarks. At best they capture a very specific workload on a very specific setup. They are almost never a perfect reflection of what will happen in the real world.
For example, I discovered that idle bhyve VMs seem to use fewer resources when the host is illumos than when the host is FreeBSD. It looks strange at first sight, but the illumos people are clearly working very hard on this, and the result is a very capable and efficient platform.
Despite my skepticism, from time to time I enjoy running some comparative tests. I already did it with Proxmox KVM versus FreeBSD bhyve, and I also compared Jails, Zones, bhyve and KVM on the same Intel N150 box. That led to the FreeBSD vs SmartOS article where I focused on CPU and memory performance on this small mini PC.
This time I wanted to do something simpler, but also closer to what I see every day: static web hosting.
Instead of synthetic CPU or I/O tests, I wanted to measure how different operating systems behave when they serve a small static site with nginx, both over HTTP and HTTPS.
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