Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better. Results are from benchmarks used to analyze and improve system performance, results with your specific work load may vary. Some of the changes that contribute to this improvement are:

The 1:1 libthr threading model is now the default.

Finer-grained IPC, networking, and scheduler locking.

A major focus on optimizing the SMP architecture that was put in place during the 5.x and 6.x branches.

Some benchmarks show linear scaling up to 8 CPUs. Many workloads see a significant performance improvement with multicore systems.