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Date:      Sat, 16 Jun 2001 15:18:48 -0700
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
To:        acahalan@cs.uml.edu
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, dillon@earth.backplane.com, mhagerty@voyager.net
Subject:   Re: Article: Network performance by OS
Message-ID:  <20010616151848A.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
In-Reply-To: <200106162031.f5GKVfm16209@saturn.cs.uml.edu>
References:  <200106162031.f5GKVfm16209@saturn.cs.uml.edu>

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From: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>
Subject: Re: Article: Network performance by OS
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 16:31:41 -0400 (EDT)

> So every FreeBSD server requires an expensive admin to tune it?
> That Win2K solution is looking good now. :-)

That says a lot about your selection criteria.

> I guess it's fair to shove Linux deep into swap (as pro-FreeBSD
> benchmarkers always do), but not fair to make FreeBSD handle a
> large directory?

This is a foolish comparison.  It's not all that rare to have a system
suffer temporary (or even continuous) spikes in demand which cause it
to go "deep into swap" whereas anyone stuffing tens of thousands of
files into directory is simply an idiot who doesn't understand what
databases are for.  It's a serious apples-and-oranges comparison.

> Biased against Win2K maybe, which beat FreeBSD without any tuning at all.

For this particular benchmark, yes.  If you want a rather less
contrived benchmark, why not compare Apache running under both Windows
NT and FreeBSD/Linux/Solaris?  It's available for all those platforms
and given that you're running the same application, it would be a fair
assumption that any difference in performance will be due to the OS
itself and you'll also be able to stand by your benchmark as
indicative of something people actually CARE about, namely web server
performance.

All this trolling merely reminds me of the benchmark paper presented a
few USENIXes ago which showed Solaris to be almost a factor of 10
slower than Linux when calling getpid() 50,000 times in a row.  Of
course the comparison was also blatantly unfair since Solaris had
extra lock overhead imposed by the fact that it was fully SMP capable
whereas (at the time) Linux was not.  Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

You want fair benchmarking, there it is.  Go put your money where your
mouth all too frequently is, Albert.

- Jordan

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