Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 23:43:18 -0600 (MDT) From: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com> To: Paul Dekkers <psd@worldaccess.nl> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD is slower than Linux !? Message-ID: <199708150543.XAA16622@obie.softweyr.ml.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.970814003604.104A-100000@gromit.nev.ml.org> References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.970814003604.104A-100000@gromit.nev.ml.org>
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Paul Dekkers writes:
> But, my main question -> I think FreeBSD is that slow because it writes
> everything to disk directly, without a good cache. Why is this like it is?
> This does not make FreeBSD very attractive for me to use as a fileserver
> (nfs or samba) or e.g. a mail server.
To malign one of Mr. Clemens more famous quotes:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
That would depend on whether you want your files fast, or want them to
still exist when the power goes out. On Linux, the default is mount
drives asynchronously, on the BSD the default is synchronous. To quote
from the FreeBSD mount(8) man page:
The options are as follows:
...
-o Options are specified with a -o flag followed by a comma separat-
ed string of options. The following options are available:
async All I/O to the file system should be done asynchronously.
This is a dangerous flag to set, and should not be used
unless you are prepared to recreate the file system
The options are there, and the choice is yours. For a web server that
gets a *lot* of hits, or a news server, you may want to use async. Do
really good backups on your web files. For a mail server, if you
consider your mail important, I wouldn't think of it. For a development
system or other volatile but somewhat non-critical, async might be a
possibility. I certainly wouldn't use it on *my* central source code
repository.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
http://www.xmission.com/~softweyr softweyr@xmission.com
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