Dear Leslie ,
I am also studying many Linux , FreeBSD , Solaris , OpenSolaris distributions to find an easily usable one with the condition that my program when becomes ready can be run on it as attached to a network . I bought more than 10 hard disks with a smallest ( GigaByte / price ) ratio value ( some 250 GB , some 320 GB ... ) . I am installing an OS on a disk in a PC , then I am attaching other one to the same PC and installing a new one . I am not using partitions and not different distributions in disks connected at the same time because they are changing structure of first hard disk . My work PC is around 2.5 GHz Intel Pentium with an Intel main board . For Delphi programming I am using XP Professional . Up to now I could not be able to obtain a fully working copy of my program compiled by Free Pascal in GUI mode due to Delphi and Free Pascal differences. After obtaining that I will start to compile it for Linux , FreeBSD , Solaris . For Internet access I am using an XP Home and another PC with Mandriva Free 2008.0 . My main aim is also to be able to find a best combination to advice to the users because in a data base environment users need many PCs and at least one server . There are pages in Internet comparing Linux and BSD distributions . If you search benchmarking of linux distributions comparison of linux distributions benchmarking of BSD distributions comparison of BSD distributions in Google , you will find a lot of pages about this subject . In your case , you did not mention exact listing of your hardware components and services running in your PC . For Lazarus , selected widget set ( GTK , GTK2 ) may affect response times . There are many messages about that issue . If you search Lazarus mailing list, you may find messages about that issue also . My experience is that there are not Lazarus performance differences due to used OS . If you have another PC running XP , you may disconnect its hard disk and attach your other OS hard disk to the same machine and compare the performance of the SAME Lazarus configuration ( Version , SVN , Widget Set , etc. ) . At present I can not suggest another solution to your problem because I could not be able reach to a useful conclusion on my studies yet . With my best wishes for your success . Mehmet Erol Sanliturk _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus