Set kern.polling.idle_poll to 1 to match the FreeBSD 4.x behavior.  Message from the mailing list:
Set kern.polling.idle_poll to 1 to match the FreeBSD 4.x behavior.  Message from the mailing list:

"Polling and kern.polling.idle_poll" -- freebsd-net -- Jun 30 2009

"A while back I upgraded some old gateways from FreeBSD 4.x to FreeBSD 6.x.
I thought the upgrade had went smoothly, but a while later I started having
users complaining about throughput.  Luckly I still had a backup of the
FreebSD 4.x install.  Did some throughput tests with iperf.  Low and behold
4.x appeared to have twice the throughput.  After lots of experimenting I
determined that turning off polling fixed the issue.  So I started digging
through the kernel code to see what had changed in the polling logic.
Finally arived at the fact that "kern.polling.idle_poll" defaults to 1 in
4.x and 0 in 6.x and above.  Turning polling back on with idle-poll enabled
fixed the performance issue.

The man page for polling states:
   kern.polling.idle_poll
        Controls if polling is enabled in the idle loop.  There are no
        reasons (other than power saving or bugs in the scheduler's han-
        dling of idle priority kernel threads) to disable this."

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