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Date:      Sun, 8 Jul 2001 03:29:32 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Bert Driehuis <driehuis@playbeing.org>
To:        "J.Goodleaf" <john@goodleaf.net>
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Benchmarks from SysAdmin mag
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.4.21.0107080307250.29990-100000@c1111.nl.compuware.com>
In-Reply-To: <20010708012209.E37CE5C69@clyde.goodleaf.net>

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On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, J.Goodleaf wrote:

> I lack the technical expertise to judge this article fully. Any thoughts? 
> FreeBSD comes out at the bottom, _below_ Win2K.
> 
> http://www.samag.com/articles/2001/0107/0107a/0107a.htm 

From the article:

"If disk I/O occupies a significant run-time portion of your
application, your disk I/O tasks will run up to 10x faster on Linux and
Windows 2000, when compared to Solaris, or 6x faster than FreeBSD."

Knowing that e-mail is the app under measurement, it is worth pointing
out that the article mentions that file systems make a hell of a
difference, but is silent about tweaking the file system, and why some
filesystems are slower than others.

If you don't enable softupdates on FreeBSD, mail delivery takes a
significant hit. Conversely, Linux's EXT2 file system may be fast, but
it is not robust with respect to file system integrity, so running a
heavily loaded mail server will result in loss of mail if the server
crashes.

The article doesn't mention if they checked the disk was properly
configured either. If SCSI tagging is not used, performance will suffer
too. Etcetera, etcetera.

Maybe the authors have done some homework in this area, but if they did,
the article doesn't show it. I hate these quicky consumer tests. I
remember, too vididly, that a Dutch consumer rag once concluded that a
Mac was an order of magnitude slower than a contemporary PC because MS
Word ran slow on it. Turned out they ran Windows under VirtualPC on
that Mac...

Cheers,

				-- Bert

-- 
Bert Driehuis -- driehuis@playbeing.org -- +31-20-3116119
If the only tool you've got is an axe, every problem looks like fun!


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