With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side.

As I explained in the previous post, replacing my notebook's hard disk with an SSD significantly improved the overall system performance -- even without any additional tweaking. But there are also a couple of simple tricks that can boost performance even further.

This three-part series is your starting point for tuning your system for power efficiency. In Part 3, the author compares the performance of the five in-kernel governors in both tuned and untuned states to show you how to optimize a Linux-based System x server.

With just a few tweaks, your Linux box can be lighter, sprightlier and quicker than ever before. Read on for the best ways to speed up your boot sequence, optimise KDE and Gnome, and get better performance from your favourite apps. We've also got some top tips from our favourite free software gurus...

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced a two day, hands-on course that acquaints atendees with Linux kernel documentation, kernel configuration, kernel debugging, kernel measurement and other tools. This course trains developers in effective debugging and performance measurement and improvement techniques for Linux kernel. This class is scheduled for October 29th - October 30th, 2009.

Whether it is memory usage and leaks, CPU usage, or optimal cache usage, analysis and profiling would be almost impossible without the right tool set. This article seeks to help developers understand the more common tools available and select the most appropriate tools for their specific performance analysis needs.`

Typically, when our database is slowing down, we want it to be faster, stronger, bigger and better! With that in mind I'm going to discuss some of the various ways to get there, and hopefully put some of the technology options in perspective.

The Ubuntu project has released the first beta of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala), which has already been favorably previewed, especially for its fast boot time. Based on Linux 2.6.31, Karmic Koala offers GNOME 2.28 and Ext4 as defaults, and adds "cloud" features and improved installation.