Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 17:11:16 -0400 From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> To: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> Cc: Mike Hoskins <mike@snafu.adept.org>, Adrian Filipi-Martin <adrian@ubergeeks.com>, Vincent Poy <vince@venus.GAIANET.NET>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What good PII/PIII Motherboards for FreeBSD and Celeron CPU's Message-ID: <379A2BF4.278805D7@bellatlantic.net> References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9907241015120.2736-100000@snafu.adept.org> <3799F7F6.CD75490F@newsguy.com>
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Daniel C. Sobral wrote: > > Mike Hoskins wrote: > > > > This isn't a comment meant to contribute to the overcommit holy war > > (opinion mode: I think FreeBSD should overcommit, or at worst have a > > sysctl and default to overcommit - admins who don't want overcommit can > > then hang themselves), but we have to be a wee bit careful when throwing > > load averages around... > > > > I've seen FreeBSD boxes virtually unuseable with 3-4 loads, and Solaris > > boxes still chugging away at 5+... Perhaps 'load average' is being > > calculated a wee bit differently. > > I think that would rather be a function of the memory footprint of > the workload. The message said memory was increased because Solaris > was overloaded with _swapping_. The load itself isn't really of much > importance in this case. I think there is some confusion. In case of swapping the workload (A.K.A. CPU run queue length) will be _low_. Intensive swapping/paging means overloaded I/O subsystem and underloaded CPU. If the CPU has high load then the paging does not make a big problem, it just happens in "background" and does not really affect the system performance limited by the CPU bottleneck. Well, it may also favor the CPU-intensive application and limit the I/O-intensive applications if the filesystems and swap areas are on the same disks. (Yes, I have seen both cases in the real life). > Since Solaris does not overcommit, it needs (much) more memory than > FreeBSD would. Thus, changing to FreeBSD and upgrading the memory at It does not. It needs more swap space configured but not the physical memory. And at the current disk prices a 9G SCSI disk configured for swap would cost under $300, so the difference is not _that_ big. > Solaris is not a bad operating system. It's just misguided. :-) It's just terrible from the systems administration standpoint :-) -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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