From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Jun 16 15:19:27 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (adsl-64-173-15-98.dsl.sntc01.pacbell.net [64.173.15.98]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 350CD37B406 for ; Sat, 16 Jun 2001 15:19:08 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@osd.bsdi.com) Received: from localhost (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by winston.osd.bsdi.com (8.11.4/8.11.3) with ESMTP id f5GMImt80220; Sat, 16 Jun 2001 15:18:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from 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 In-Reply-To: <200106162031.f5GKVfm16209@saturn.cs.uml.edu> References: <200106162031.f5GKVfm16209@saturn.cs.uml.edu> X-Mailer: Mew version 1.94.1 on Emacs 20.7 / Mule 4.0 (HANANOEN) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20010616151848A.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 15:18:48 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard X-Dispatcher: imput version 20000228(IM140) Lines: 41 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG From: "Albert D. Cahalan" 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message