From owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Jun 18 20:02:57 2003
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From: John Von Essen <john@essenz.com>
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Subject: performance boost...
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This one took me by surprise, so I have to share. I was consulting at 
company who used a Linux cluster to deliver internal mailings (they 
have roughly 30,000 employees across the US - which was too much for a 
Microsoft Exchange distribution list to handle). The cluster nodes ran 
some perl code which effectively called a "performance-tuned" sendmail. 
Delivery throughput was around 17 messages per second.

After weeks of arguing I finally got the okay to upgrade one of the 
nodes to FreeBSD. The result was that after the next mailing, the 
FreeBSD box had a delivery throughput of 29.7 messages per second. Same 
hardware, same perl code, same sendmail. Something as simple as 
switching from RedHat linux to FreeBSD almost doubled performance.

The best part of course is the satisfaction I now get from rubbing it 
in to all the Solaris and Linux admins I work with!

-John