From owner-freebsd-questions Sat May 30 12:46:51 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id MAA22896 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Sat, 30 May 1998 12:46:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from dt050n33.san.rr.com (@dt053nd2.san.rr.com [204.210.34.210]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA22870 for ; Sat, 30 May 1998 12:46:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Studded@san.rr.com) Received: from san.rr.com (Studded@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dt050n33.san.rr.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA04840; Sat, 30 May 1998 12:46:28 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Studded@san.rr.com) Message-ID: <35706214.119D02EB@san.rr.com> Date: Sat, 30 May 1998 12:46:28 -0700 From: Studded Organization: Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.6-STABLE-0507 i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Frank Pawlak CC: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RTFM References: <356CA20F.1F47@clarityconnect.com> <980528041610.ZM1327@darkstar.connect.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Frank Pawlak wrote: > > Can anyone tell me where I can locate some accurate and current information > describing why FreeBSD can carry heavier server loads than Linux? Linux' kernel was designed for 256 fd's. It can be extended beyond that with some gymnastics however fundamentally the whole thing was not designed for "heavy server loads." The BSD networking layer has no such restrictions. We had a network consisting of almost all linux servers when I started on dalnet almost 3 years ago. Ours was the first machine to try FreeBSD and it wasn't very long before there weren't any linux boxes left. :) Now there are a few new linux machines but they are all in .eu where their client load is extremely small. Our experience with linux was that after a given period of time under load (that period varying with factors we were never able to clearly determine, but never more than 4 or 5 days) the networking layer would just give up and the server would become non-responsive over the network even though the machine was still up (active at the console). At the time there were several people in the linux world who were confirming that the failure was in the networking layer, including one of our programmers who contributes to linux. The word is that the 2.1 version of the linux kernel fixes "all" of the networking problems, however in our tests we have yet to get a linux 2.1 machine to hold more than 400 clients reliably, which is approximately where the 2.0 series failed as well. Of course, I have very little confidence in the person running the linux test, but I don't actually care that much either. :) Doug -- *** Chief Operations Officer, DALnet IRC network *** *** Proud designer and maintainer of one of the world's largest *** Internet Relay Chat servers with 5,328 simultaneous connections *** Try spider.dal.net on ports 6662-4 (Powered by FreeBSD) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message