Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 17:24:42 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> Cc: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, mhagerty@voyager.net Subject: Re: Article: Network performance by OS Message-ID: <200106180024.f5I0Og209156@earth.backplane.com> References: <200106162031.f5GKVfm16209@saturn.cs.uml.edu> <200106162104.f5GL4dX02015@earth.backplane.com> <3B2CDC8C.3C7E382A@bellatlantic.net> <200106171721.f5HHLIu06985@earth.backplane.com> <3B2D39ED.EE27976A@bellatlantic.net>
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:> But this isn't true at all. How many people need to make thousands
:> or tens of thousands of simultanious connections to a machine out of the
:> box? Almost nobody. So to run a benchmark and have it hit these
:
:You are essentially saying: out primary target market is small
:servers. We can accomodate bigger loads as well but this may
:require some hand tuning. On the other hand, NT's target market
:is large servers, so it does not need tuning there but performs
:worse in the smaller configurations.
No, what I am essentially saying is that anyone who has a need to
run something that sophisticated had better have some clue as to the
platform he is using or he has no business running it. Even if the
platform were tuned for the so-called 'large' installation, if the
administrator doesn't know much about his most critical server the poor
company that hired him is going to have a hellofalot more to worry
about then the server not being magically tuned!
And I will point out that NT is hardly optimized for 'large servers'.
What, are you nuts? It took BEST Internet months... that's MONTHS...
hundreds of man-hours to optimize an NT box to handle more then a
handful of simultanious frontpage users and even then it couldn't even
approach what one of our FreeBSD boxes was doing. It took HiWay
Technologies another few months, *with* microsoft's help, to get their
dedicated NT web server platform to even come close to what their
SGI boxes were throwing out. It was a disaster all around. Optimized
out of the box? I don't think so. An NT or W2K box might run on
a 16-way system, and it may appear all rosy in contrived benchmarks,
but in the real world it doesn't stack up. At least we (FreeBSD and
Linux) don't pretend that our systems scale well to 16-way boxes...
only Solaris (and now defunct SGI hardware) can make that claim. NT
and W2K on a 16-way box would be a huge waste of money.
Windows admins have odd ideas about what constitutes 'large'. Their idea
of large is a rack full of windows boxes serving a few hundred active
users, or maybe a colo-full of boxes serving a few thousand, or perhaps
a bunch of expensive 4-way or 16-way cpu boxes to server X users.
Our idea of large (in this case defined by Terry or Paul Saab) is one
FreeBSD box handling tens of thousands to a hundred thousand TCP
connections, and a rack full of machine serving millions. Windows
people conveniently forget the amount of work it takes to get an NT or
W2K box operating, the amount of work it takes to upgrade one, and the
amount of work it takes to fix one when something breaks.
(remainder removed)
-Matt
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