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It is complex topic. I'm using FreeBSD at server environment (you are right that Wifi and GPU support of FreeBSD is lagging, so I'm not using it on desktops/laptops).

As server, FreeBSD needs increasing all socket buffers via sysctls, tuning NIC IRQ moderation (depends on NIC, but we are not discussing Realtek ones here, am I right?), and, in the past, VFS caching and read-ahead was very conservative by default, but now ZFS is the same as on Linux (unfortunately, as some non-tunable Linux-induced optimizations slightly hurt performance on BSD, best ZFS performance were before switch to OpenZFS).

For example, "stock" FreeBSD 13 on my hand-built NAS (5x8Tb zraid, system on SSD, E3-1220v3, 32GB RAM, Intel 10G NIC) only can serve ~250MB/s over SMB (with same Samba as Linux uses, of course), and after tuning (socket buffers, NIC IRQ coalescing, etc) it serves 750-800MB/s from cache and 500MB/s from spinning rust (which is obvious limitation of HDDs, not OS).

Unfortunately, I don't know one coherent and modern FreeBSD performance tuning guides, but this guide [1] is mostly actual still, for network part.

[1] - https://calomel.org/freebsd_network_tuning.html




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