From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Jun 17 17:24:51 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from earth.backplane.com (earth-nat-cw.backplane.com [208.161.114.67]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6C32237B401 for ; Sun, 17 Jun 2001 17:24:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@earth.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by earth.backplane.com (8.11.3/8.11.2) id f5I0Og209156; Sun, 17 Jun 2001 17:24:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 17:24:42 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon Message-Id: <200106180024.f5I0Og209156@earth.backplane.com> To: Sergey Babkin Cc: "Albert D. Cahalan" , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, mhagerty@voyager.net Subject: Re: Article: Network performance by OS 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> 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 :> 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message