# Which one consumes less resources? FreeBSD or Gentoo



## Anon (Oct 10, 2011)

IMO they are both two of the greatest OS's in the world.

Gentoo is definitely better than Debian (probably one of the more popular Linux distros for servers) on servers from my experience. FreeBSD I don't have much experience to since I'm new to it, but I'm really enjoying it and it seems to barely use any resources either (just like Gentoo). On another tech board I frequent someone was saying that Gentoo for a server uses less resources while Gentoo for a desktop uses more, which I'd probably agree with.

Just a question for fun/curiosity :e :stud


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## YZMSQ (Oct 10, 2011)

It's all about the applications running on your box rather than OS itself, say, OS just consumes a little system resources, while the softwares endeavor to get down all your memory and disks, which leads your box to be pretty much stuffed quickly. So, regarding this question, it's highly unlikely for me to see the difference between Gentoo and FreeBSD when it comes to the point of resource usage of both OS, 'cause as what I stated before, it's the apps that make difference. Fix me if I'm not right.


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## graudeejs (Oct 10, 2011)

NanoBSD


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## ramonovski (Oct 10, 2011)

I used to be a Gentoo user before FreeBSD, and for desktop purpose with almost the same applications in the same box, Gentoo went (just a little bit) more efficient in mem, temp and cpu than FreeBSD (with GENERIC kernel). But after customizing the FreeBSD kernel the thing ended in tie.


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## Anon (Oct 10, 2011)

ramonovski said:
			
		

> I used to be a Gentoo user before FreeBSD, and for desktop purpose with almost the same applications in the same box, Gentoo went (just a little bit) more efficient in mem, temp and cpu than FreeBSD (with GENERIC kernel). But after customizing the FreeBSD kernel the thing ended in tie.



Nice.

What changes did you make to the FreeBSD kernel?


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## ramonovski (Oct 10, 2011)

Just minimal adjustments, the classic stuff you customize based on your Hardware.

BTW, http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/kernelconfig.html


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## UNIXgod (Oct 10, 2011)

I don't have a benchmark handy but I would say FreeBSD. both can be tuned though. I believe BSD can still be installed on an aging 386 with just a meg or two of ram.


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## Beastie (Oct 11, 2011)

UNIXgod said:
			
		

> I believe BSD can still be installed on an aging 386 with just a meg or two of ram.


Support for anything under 486 was dropped a few years ago as far as I know.
And even though it's very lightweight, I doubt it would run on less than the required 24 MB of memory. It's not as primitive as single-user, monotasking DOS after all!


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## Crivens (Oct 11, 2011)

Beastie said:
			
		

> And even though it's very lightweight, I doubt it would run on less than the required 24 MB of memory. It's not as primitive as single-user, monotasking DOS after all!



You mean something like this? Drat!


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