Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 21:09:51 -0700 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: Studded <Studded@gorean.org> Cc: "'freebsd-questions@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs. Linux under load (Was: Re: Fact or Fiction (Unix vs NT)) Message-ID: <3732678F.1030A4C8@3-cities.com> References: <199904150654.XAA23108@gms.gmsnet.com> <37161B6A.BCA9C1CA@3-cities.com> <373236A8.A03C02A8@gorean.org>
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Studded wrote: > > Kent Stewart wrote: > > > One of the reasons I'm using FreeBSD is because I was told by many > > people that Linux is unstable under heavy loads and that FreeBSD > > isn't. Whether that is true or not, it is what many Unix people > > believe. My ISP went from Linux to BSDI and their system stability > > went up a factor of 10 from my point of view. > > Our *extensive* testing on this very topic has proven conclusively that > FreeBSD stands up under loads with thousands of simultaneous > connections, where linux falls down at around 800. The problem seems to > be in the number of file descriptors allocated per connection. My > personal best is 5,382 IRC users on one FreeBSD box, there are other IRC > servers that have done over 8,000. One of the reason's you benchmark is to assign a number to your usage. You can only believe your benchmark because the benchmarks that someone else put together analyze's their needs and not yours. I think the first time that www.cdrom.org went to 5000 concurrent ftp users and continued to run was a noteworthy occasion. > > Some of the linux diehards on our network are still trying to make a go > of it, but even the latest kernels just don't hold up under heavy load. > They may last a day or two, but eventually something in the networking > layer seems to break down and the box becomes unreachable. Different > apps with different load patterns may differ of course, but for > something like ircd/ftpd/httpd FreeBSD will beat linux hands down on the > same hardware, every time. > > In fairness, this isn't all that bad of a thing really. Linux was > designed to be a desktop OS for having fun with unix, and BSD was > designed as a server platform for serious work. Each of those is a good > thing. Vive le difference I say. :) I'm really neutral when it comes to OS'es. I've found over the years that all system's have a number of unique features that are important to someone. Each of these systems also have a number of wart's or features that people assign a negative value to. Fortunately, many of the pluses are in areas that are a negative on other systems. We have a choice this way. Variety keeps everyone happy. I had a series of benchmarks that we ran on supercomputers. In the late 1980's, no one let users on a supercomputer. Everyone had Sun's or HP's as frontends and people wrecked that enviornment with X, full-screen editors, and etc. Our Cray had to stand alone and we introduced scripts into the benchmarks that had 100 simulated people editing and etc. on the Cray. It did remarkably well for a 8ns system. You can't keep everybody happy. If you have data processing to do, you keep it on a machine that you can optimize the user response out. Responding to a mouse moving around is not beneficial to the background jobs. Not many people would run X on a busy ftpd or httpd system but that is what people are doing when they put these services on a Windows machine. It can be done but it requires a computer with significantly more horsepower. When I think of definition of over doing something, I think of Bill Cosby and his 200mph record albumn where he talks about the 1200 hp Cobra that Shelby put together. I could imagine someone only driving it around the block once <grin>. Kent > > Doug > -- > *** Chief Operations Officer, DALnet IRC network *** > > Nominated for quote of the year is the statement made by Representative > Dick Armey (Texas), who when asked if he were in the President's place, > would he resign, responded: > > "If I were in the President's place I would not get a chance to resign. > I would be lying in a pool of my own blood hearing Mrs. Armey standing > over me saying, 'How do I reload this damn thing?'" -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html Hunting Archibald Stewart, b 1802 in Ballymena, Antrim Co., NIR http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/genealogy/archibald_stewart.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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