Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 15:37:05 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> To: ccf@master.ndi.net Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: technical comparison Message-ID: <20010521153705K.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10105211644070.90713-100000@master.ndi.net> References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10105211644070.90713-100000@master.ndi.net>
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From: "Charles C. Figueiredo" <ccf@master.ndi.net> Subject: technical comparison Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 17:10:54 -0400 (EDT) > I work in an environment consisting of 300+ systems, all FreeBSD > and Solaris, along with lots of EMC and F5 stuff. Our engineering division > has been working on a dynamic content server and search engine for the > past 2.5 years. They have consistently not met up to performance and > throughput requirements and have always blamed our use of FreeBSD for it. This is your first warning sign. This has all the appearances of a group of people who've _already_ made their conclusions and are now busily engaged in fitting the data to match. The only defense against this kind of situation is to take their data head-on. You're probably not going to get them to alter their preexisting bias since they probably have their own reasons for being Linux evangelists, but you can at least fight them to a stand-still on the comparative data front. Sinc FreeBSD is already entrenched there, that means you win the battle, at least for now. Winning the war will require that you not get complacent and continue with your objective measurements to prove (or disprove) FreeBSD's suitability for your needs. In the cases where you disprove it, at least the data is in "friendly hands" and you can open back-channel communications with us to try and address those shortcomings, whatever they may be. To take your current list: > a) A machine that has fast character operations I think that's probably more architecture (machine) dependant than it is a function of the OS. A PC does a fine job at many things, but an IBM 3090 it's not. You should probably establish "as compared to what" for this argument and see what Linux's numbers are; I suspect it will quickly become a non-issue since the beancounters won't want to spend the kind of money truly improving this would cost. > b) A *supported* Oracle client That's a gotcha, no doubt about it. About the best you can probably do here is show that the Linux Oracle client works just fine under compatibility mode and determine just how many support calls you make to Oracle with respect to their client (and not the server) software a year. > c) A filesystem that will be fast in light of tens of thousands of > files in a single directory (maybe even hundreds of thousands) I think we can more than hold our own with UFS + soft updates. This is another area where you need to get hard numbers from the Linux folks. I think your assumption that "Linux handles this effectively" is flawed and I'd like to see hard numbers which prove otherwise; you should demand no less. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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