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Date:      Thu, 25 Mar 1999 22:30:06 -0800 (PST)
From:      <unknown@riverstyx.net>
To:        Steve Price <sprice@hiwaay.net>
Cc:        rick hamell <hamellr@dsinw.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD: The Storage Wars
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.04.9903252214190.8166-100000@hades.riverstyx.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.02.9903252322090.13895-100000@fly.HiWAAY.net>

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On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Steve Price wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Mar 1999 unknown@riverstyx.net wrote:
> 
> # I've never needed a patch, except for adding driver support (for the
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> ... and then you give two examples of when 'never' happened.

Everyone needs driver updates.  The 3c905b hadn't even been released when
I installed the machine I needed the patch for.  I upgraded the hardware
and I needed the patch -- hardly a Linux problem.  And the infamous TCP/IP
problems, which almost everyone has fallen victim to in the past two
years.  My point was, running Linux doesn't mean patching your machine
every couple days to fix problems.  I don't know where people get this
idea of Linux instability, but it's just not true.

> # 3c905b ethernet adapter in 2.0.30) and fixing the various TCP/IP stack
> # holes that were running rampant in 2.0.30 era kernels.
> # 
> # I personally only use FreeBSD as a hobby machine.  I'd like to use it in
> # production but I haven't got enough FreeBSD knowledge to do that right
> # now.  I still can't find any documentation for changes I should make to
> # the configuration/kernel/etc when I want to really push a FreeBSD
> # machine...
> 
> Please?!  I've seen you post several times now and none of them that I
> have seen have asked any specific questions related to tuning a FreeBSD
> box.  You want to know what knobs to tweak and can't find the answers
> written up anywhere, then ask.

I want to run a webserver that's going to probably be serving about 400
requests simultaneously on average, but it may spike up to 900 at times.
Bandwidth-wise, it'll be moving about 600+k/sec on a PII-450 w/384 megs
RAM. There'll be a lot of CGI involved, as well as a MySQL database that's
being used for authentication as well as keeping track of a bunch of user
accounting data. I tried FreeBSD initially, but it didn't last 10 minutes
before coming down.

I searched on the web and checked links from the FreeBSD homepage, as well
as a couple other FreeBSD related pages that I found, but found no
information on tuning FreeBSD machines.  The HOWTOs for FreeBSD are
minimal.  There aren't many users out there with easily accessible
information on what they've done to make it work.

What do I need to do to make it work? Increase the number of tasks?  Can I
just use ulimit, or do I need to change stuff in the kernel?  I noticed
some stuff in there limiting the per-user tasks to 64, but that didn't
look reasonable, and it looked like it got ignored anyway, so I don't know
what bearing that had on the system.  How can I increase the maximum
number of file descriptors/inodes?  Are there any changes I should make to
the memory management stuff, and if so where and how?  What else needs to
be done to a FreeBSD machine to allow it to handle heavy load?



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