FreeBSD, Linux and Timekeeping

Eric Hodel | Fri, 28 Oct 2005 18:12:00 GMT

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I’ve been reading a fascinating thread on the freebsd-current mailing list about why MySQL on FreeBSD performs so much less well than Linux.

Apparently MySQL makes many, many calls to the kernel to figure out what time it is so that it can keep track of various things. On Linux this is no problem because they’ve got sloppy timekeeping in their kernel, but FreeBSD is much more accurate.

It eventually lead to a discussion of timers and timing in FreeBSD and how to get the current time faster.

Part of discussion reveals that on the x86 architecture it is incredibly difficult to get the current time in a fast and reliable way.

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