2) mysql has an immediate drop-off above 8 clients. This is actually due to pthread mutex contention within mysql and not a FreeBSD issue, i.e. a mysql scalability bottleneck.
2a) FreeBSD is still outperforming Linux on this workload but I don't have updated graphs yet.
Much faster in my tests
On 8 core systems postgresql blows mysql out of the water (on FreeBSD). Compare
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/pgsql-ncpu.png
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/netbsd.png (ignore the netbsd comparisons if you like)
Two things to notice:
1) pgsql has 45% higher transaction rates
2) mysql has an immediate drop-off above 8 clients. This is actually due to pthread mutex contention within mysql and not a FreeBSD issue, i.e. a mysql scalability bottleneck.
2a) FreeBSD is still outperforming Linux on this workload but I don't have updated graphs yet.