Optimising FreeBSD and its kernel
This is a very simple step by step guide on optimising your FreeBSD server or workstation. It doesn’t go into a great amount of detail, but after spending several months searching for one source of simple optimisation information and failing, I wrote this paper. All the suggestions listed here are known optimisations available to you if you know where to find them and have the time to do so. There is nothing secret, or special or amazing in this paper, just information on how you can optimise your system.
It can mostly be applied to the other BSDs too, but not Linux. There are plenty of Linux documents out there, so go find one of those. I’m sure there are several HOWTO’s. This document is true as of the release of FreeBSD 4.8. Some parts of it, such as optimising your kernel, can also be applied to some previous releases.
http://silverwraith.com/papers/freebsd-kernel.php
http://silverwraith.com/papers/freebsd-tuning.php