From owner-freebsd-advocacy Thu Jun 14 0:28:11 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from sol.serv.u-szeged.hu (sol.serv.u-szeged.hu [160.114.51.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4558737B409 for ; Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:27:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu) Received: from petra.hos.u-szeged.hu by sol.serv.u-szeged.hu (8.9.3+Sun/SMI-SVR4) id JAA24189; Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:27:55 +0200 (MEST) Received: from sziszi by petra.hos.u-szeged.hu with local (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 15ARXl-0003nT-00 for ; Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:27:53 +0200 Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:27:53 +0200 From: Szilveszter Adam To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: An interesting read... Message-ID: <20010614092753.A13828@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> Mail-Followup-To: Szilveszter Adam , freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org References: <20010613192426.B1035@superhero.org> <3B28134D.4607540F@acuson.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <3B28134D.4607540F@acuson.com>; from djohnson@acuson.com on Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 06:28:45PM -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 06:28:45PM -0700, David Johnson wrote: > Erich Zigler wrote: > > > I'm taking the results of said tests with a grain of salt. Considering that > > FreeBSD was the lowest in almost everything. Including network performance. > > They showed that Windows 2000 even beat FreeBSD in this arena. It's worth a > > read. > > I sure hope Microsoft paid the author in a timely manner... The article is available online: http://www.sysadminmag.com/current/0107a/0107a.htm and, as was already discussed on the Hungarian FreeBSD users list, it mostly hits upon the usual suspects: - threading is not as efficient on FreeBSD as it is on some other OSs. We know this (esp in SMP situations). - File system performance lagging because of sync mounts and no softupdates (the authors tested with default installs) we know this too. - It supplies a rehash of the controversy of using separate processes in daemons to handle new tasks versus using threads and using blocking vs non blocking TCP/IP calls. The author clearly states his preference for asynchronous threads and non-blocking TCP/IP calls. (He is from the company that makes the Lyris mailing list server) - Author states that in his test (Using 4.2) he was unable to make FreeBSD serve more than 2500 connections simultaneously while testing email delivery to a test list. Contrary to expectations, w2k is not first on the list, Linux comes in as winner. But FreeBSD is indeed the last. I think that (while you can argue that his design choices may not be equally suitable for all network applications) the issues he raises are partly valid. We have known about them for a long time. 5.0, if it ever hits the streets:-) will hopefully correct some of these, provided that softupdates will reach the level of maturity that you can use them without worries on all file systems. The tests (as usual for lab tests) were not necessarily based on real-life situations (eg writing etc 10000 files in a directory) but they still give some hints, and this is all such benchmarks are good for. -- Regards: Szilveszter ADAM Szeged University Szeged Hungary To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message