[kmike]

Originally Posted by Erwin

Only if you compile the wrong kernel. FreeBSD 6.0 using AMD64 SMP kernel on a Quad Opteron just plain flies.

Well, but you haven't compared it to Linux, have you?
I already posted some links to FreeBSD/Linux comparisons in MySQL performance, here're some more:
FreeBSD 5.x: http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Li...5-06/0331.html
FreeBSD 6.x:
http://www.archivesat.com/FreeBSD_Pe...read412787.htm
http://www.archivesat.com/FreeBSD_Pe...read420280.htm

Ports are better than yum/rpm because ports automatically fixes all broken dependencies and installs everything automatically using 1 command: portinstall apache or portinstall mysql5

Can't get any easier than that.

I see some confusion here: yum does resolve the missing dependencies! I'm not sure what do you mean by "broken" dependencies, probably 3rd party rpm packages? But the same goes for the ports - if you install some 3rd party program manually, outside the ports system (doing usual "./configure; make; make install"), you have to resolve its dependencies manually.

There's one fundamental difference between the ports and rpm-based package managers - rpm's are all binary, and you build your ports from the source when installing them. It could be considered as an advantage as you're supposedly tuning the package for your system when building it (with the right parameters), but some time ago I saw the tests of Gentoo (which is touting the same approach as an advantage) vs some binary-based distribution didn't reveal any substantial performance advantages.

And finally, you can easily rebuild RPM package from the source rpm with options tailored for your architecture, too (that's what I did for our install, rebuilt php rpms with Opteron optimizations). It's as easy as doing "rpmbuild --target=athlon --rebuild yourpackage.src.rpm"