Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 16:36:13 -0700 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: Cliff Addy <fbsdlist@federation.addy.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Disgruntled Linux User... questions about FreeBSD Message-ID: <199807152336.QAA11351@implode.root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 15 Jul 1998 16:47:22 EDT." <Pine.BSF.3.95q.980715164640.6284C-100000@federation.addy.com>
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> > > What are you talking about, I was talking about for a HIGHLY used server, > > > as in, more then cdrom.com, and I was talking about a REAL server, not a > > > PC supped up. I am talking about a rack mount server, a REAL server. > > > Which in case you where out of the loop, most REAL servers use RISC. > > > > More than ftp.cdrom.com? I thought ftp.cdrom.com was one of the busiest > > if not _THE_ busiest FTP Server on the Internet. What servers are you > > talking about? > > It seems that this all depends on what you mean by "busy." An ftp server > can be serving a truckload of files, but that doesn't exactly tax the > system or OS, all you're doing is running a lot of identical processes and > pushing data though the NIC. Our web servers, while not in cdrom.com's > class, pump out 800,000 to 1,000,000 files a day but spend most of their > time in idle. If you think that is all that happens on ftp.cdrom.com, then, well, you've never run a public FTP server the size of wcarchive. :-) In fact, there is SO much more to it than that. There are something like 75 mirrors that are updating almost continuously, and more than 50 archive maintainers to keep the non-mirrored content up to date. Just about everything is used to accomplish this - perl based mirror, ftp, cvsup, ssh, rsync, etc. Plus just about every shell that FreeBSD supports - sh, csh, bash, tcsh, ksh. Not to mention that many of the archive maintainers also send/receive email on the machine, so mail, mh, elm, pine, etc are all in regular use. ...and of course all of the editors - vi, vim, emacs, etc. Prior to a few days ago, we also handled all of cdrom.com's WWW traffic as well on wcarchive, included with this is a boatload of custom cgi-bin. ...and let's not sell FTP short, either; after all, this subject thread was all about how well FreeBSD and PCs work for serving files. There are always 5000 or more processes, often 10000 or more TCP connections, and more filesystem and network traffic than you can shake a stick at. Typical load average is around 30. My point is that wcarchive shares the burden of a busy multiuser "shell machine" in addition to all of the file serving that it does. I don't think there is an area of the kernel that _isn't_ actively exercised on the machine. -DG David Greenman Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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