Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 22:14:28 -0400 From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> To: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> Cc: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, mhagerty@voyager.net Subject: Re: Article: Network performance by OS Message-ID: <3B2EB584.727BCCA8@bellatlantic.net> References: <200106162031.f5GKVfm16209@saturn.cs.uml.edu> <200106162104.f5GL4dX02015@earth.backplane.com> <3B2CDC8C.3C7E382A@bellatlantic.net> <200106171721.f5HHLIu06985@earth.backplane.com> <3B2D39ED.EE27976A@bellatlantic.net> <200106180024.f5I0Og209156@earth.backplane.com>
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Matt Dillon wrote: > > :> But this isn't true at all. How many people need to make thousands > :> or tens of thousands of simultanious connections to a machine out of the > :> box? Almost nobody. So to run a benchmark and have it hit these > : > :You are essentially saying: out primary target market is small > :servers. We can accomodate bigger loads as well but this may > :require some hand tuning. On the other hand, NT's target market > :is large servers, so it does not need tuning there but performs > :worse in the smaller configurations. > > No, what I am essentially saying is that anyone who has a need to > run something that sophisticated had better have some clue as to the > platform he is using or he has no business running it. Even if the > platform were tuned for the so-called 'large' installation, if the > administrator doesn't know much about his most critical server the poor > company that hired him is going to have a hellofalot more to worry > about then the server not being magically tuned! I agree with that. By the way, is not it customary for the benchmarks run by magazines to consult the manufacturers if the testers are not able to configure the system by themselves ? I don't remember these guys asking questions on -hackers. > And I will point out that NT is hardly optimized for 'large servers'. > What, are you nuts? It took BEST Internet months... that's MONTHS... > hundreds of man-hours to optimize an NT box to handle more then a > handful of simultanious frontpage users and even then it couldn't even > approach what one of our FreeBSD boxes was doing. It took HiWay Are you talking about Hotmail ? My understanding about it was that they run 5000 small servers, exactly the case when even an out-of-the-box FreeBSD will shine, not even speaking about a tuned one. > Technologies another few months, *with* microsoft's help, to get their > dedicated NT web server platform to even come close to what their > SGI boxes were throwing out. It was a disaster all around. Optimized > out of the box? I don't think so. An NT or W2K box might run on > a 16-way system, and it may appear all rosy in contrived benchmarks, 32-way I think. At least that's what a full-blown Unisys ES7000 machine has and MS claims to support it. > but in the real world it doesn't stack up. At least we (FreeBSD and > Linux) don't pretend that our systems scale well to 16-way boxes... > only Solaris (and now defunct SGI hardware) can make that claim. NT And Dynix and AIX and HP-UX and UnixWare. > and W2K on a 16-way box would be a huge waste of money. Well, UnixWare runs circles around it on the same box. However FreeBSD does not scale well beyond 2 CPUs yet. > Windows admins have odd ideas about what constitutes 'large'. Their idea > of large is a rack full of windows boxes serving a few hundred active > users, or maybe a colo-full of boxes serving a few thousand, or perhaps > a bunch of expensive 4-way or 16-way cpu boxes to server X users. Nope, these SMP boxes are usually used for the database servers. The difficulty with the databases is that (unlike web servers or pop/smtp servers or other such stuff) you can't easily divide the job to an arbitrary number of small machines with a simple load balancer. The efficiency of interlocking and data exchange requires one big machine with large memory and many peripheral buses. > Our idea of large (in this case defined by Terry or Paul Saab) is one > FreeBSD box handling tens of thousands to a hundred thousand TCP > connections, and a rack full of machine serving millions. Windows > people conveniently forget the amount of work it takes to get an NT or > W2K box operating, the amount of work it takes to upgrade one, and the > amount of work it takes to fix one when something breaks. They don't fix, they reinstall (not that it reduces the amount of time but the contrariwise). -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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