Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 12:36:05 +0100 From: Paul Robinson <paul@iconoplex.co.uk> To: jakob@grimstveit.no Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: PHP performance on FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x Message-ID: <20041029113605.GI18312@iconoplex.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <pan.2004.10.29.06.29.40.89444@grimstveit.no> References: <pan.2004.10.29.06.29.40.89444@grimstveit.no>
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On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 08:29:40AM +0200, Jakob Breivik Grimstveit wrote: > At my local *BSD- and Linux User Group [1} we yesterday had a presentation > by eZ Publish [2] a PHP based CMS and portal builder framework for web. Oh, another one. What the world needs is more PHP based CMS and portal builder frameworks for the web. *sigh*. > During the session it was stated by the speaker mentioned that running > their system on FreeBSD (both 4.x and 5.x) not necessarily would be a good > thing due to a lot of filesystem calls in their product, which PHP on > FreeBSD had performance problems with under high load. In other words he > did not recommend FreeBSD as server platform for eZ Publish (or any > other PHP software for that matter) where a high number of visitors was > probable. > > I found this to be difficult to believe, and decided to ask you about > whether this might be the case or not. Well, first off, they've just told you that their product doesn't scale because it's I/O bound to disk. This should make you question their competence, seeing as this is a web application. I for one, would be reluctant to buy their product if they had just told me it'll start to break because they can't engineer their way around a known performance constraint. Especially when there are open source solutions that will. Anyway, that doesn't answer your question. It's been a while since I last did some serious benchmarking. Perhaps it's time we went about looking at it again. I suspect a current stable linux build would outperform FreeBSD 4.x on various fronts for reasons most admins know about - some of the code in there is rather old. When it comes to 5.x I'd be interested to know if they were running the latest 5.3-RC code which doesn't have lots of debugging stuff thrown in, or whether they were running older code that was explicitly not recommended for production that had been built with the debug stuff. I think this is a case of comparing apples with pears in one instance, and gross incompetence and inability to read /usr/src/UPDATING in another. I would ask them to repeat their test with 5.3-RELEASE in a week or two. If the problem is still there, ask them to publish the details of their benchmarks so we can assert whether there is a real problem, or if they're just GPL-bunnies spreading FUD. Whilst most users some time ago argued that BSD outperformed Linux and was therefore better, increasingly I've found that BSD offers other advantages over Linux regardless of Linux. I wouldn't worry too much about benchmarks, but I do think they're probably wrong here. -- Paul Robinson http://www.iconoplex.co.uk/ "All I know is I'm not a Marxist" - Karl Marx
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