OpenBSD Performance

bsdmagic

Hi, I want to know how performance on OpenBSD has been for you guys. For me its been pretty slow. Firefox opens slowly, games like Minecraft are slow and crash a lot, etc, etc.

Is there any way I can help it go a little quicker? How has it been for you?

I’m not trying to bash on OpenBSD, I’m just not sure if I can continue running it at least as a desktop OS because they focus so much on security almost to the point of unusabillity. (At least for me)

JuvenalUrbino

bsdmagic start by enabling soft updates in order to optimize disk performance

bsduck

bsdmagic For me its been pretty slow.

Same for me, on various machines. You may be able to improve performance somewhat but it will still be slower than most other systems.

oui

bsdmagic Could you share the output of dmesg and your Xorg log?

OpenBSD's performance is alright if properly configured to your hardware.
Just tested the 6.9 release on my Dell OptiPlex 3020M - firefox loads under 1 second and overall experience is pretty snappy. I had to change the Xorg driver from modesetting to intel, enable the TearFree option, turn on gfx.webrender.all and layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true in about:config in firefox.

Also just to be sure, are you using a SSD?

bsdmagic

oui My hardware is supported. I’m using current. I have intel graphics and an NVMe ssd but I haven’t switched from modesetting to intel like you mentioned. I have a Dell Inspiron 15 3501. Thanks for those Firefox settings btw.

How can I switch from modesetting to intel?

The Laptop - https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/2507673/Dell-Inspiron-15-3501-Laptop-156/

bsdmagic

@"JuvenalUrbino"

JuvenalUrbino Thanks I’ll try this

oui

bsdmagic

bsdmagic How can I switch from modesetting to intel?

Create an intel.conf file in usr/X11R6/share/X11/xorg.conf.d:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel Graphics"
    Driver "intel"
    Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

I doubt this would make things better for you since the modesetting driver is recommended over the Intel driver for the newer Intel chipsets, but you could try.

rvp

bsdmagic Try re-enabling multithreading (if your CPU has that feature).
In /etc/sysctl.conf add: hw.smt=1

bsdmagic

rvp Yeah, but I’ve seen people say it doesn’t help much for them, but it may for me. I’ll probably just have to give it a go to find out.

oui

oui I stated in my previous post (deleted) that your Intel integrated graphics card isn't yet supported which is wrong. Correction; OpenBSD seems to have updated their DRM to support 11th gen Intel graphics according to this. FreeBSD's newest release seems to also support 11th gen Intel graphics, you can refer to this page.

Nonetheless, it would help if you could share the output of your Xorg log and dmesg so that we could get more info.

CiotBSD

bsdmagic

Another way is to understand the limits system. On OpenBSD, by default, they're minimalist, but functional.