Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 05:30:12 -0700 (MST) From: "Forrest W. Christian" <forrestc@imach.com> To: Emre Bastuz <info@emre.de> Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Solaris vs. FreeBSD in High Traffic Environments Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0201200516350.15973-100000@workhorse.iMach.com> In-Reply-To: <3C4A97B6.4070409@emre.de>
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On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Emre Bastuz wrote: > Question 1: > Does anyone know the default values on a Solaris machine for the > following kernel compilation parameters - I don't. I do know when we were running Solaris there were some parameters which we ended up tuning, not from a stability point of view, but instead from a "the defaults were too low to even run hundreds of virtual domains with separate logfiles" and similar views. I would say that the current -STABLE chain of FreeBSD has some rather low defaults for a lot of settings needed in a server environment. Out of the box, the NMBclusters, Maxusers, and also the tcp/ip window size settings are rather low. See man tuning for the tcp/ip stuff, and others which you may have overlooked. > I guess that Solaris has these settings up to high values by > default, that=B4s why the Solaris machine never crashed but > FreeBSD did. Can anyone confirm this ? I think that perhaps some of the equivalent settings are either dynamic in nature on Solaris or, as you suggested, the defaults are higher. I can't confirm this, just personal observation. > Question 2: > The result of the 'top' command looks veeeeeeery different on > Solaris and FreeBSD. >=20 > When the Solaris box was running the webserver, the load was at > about '300' - whereas FreeBSD seems to handle beautifully smooth > at a load of '0.3'. Somehow this is too good to be true. >=20 > Can anyone point out why there=B4s such a huge difference ? > Any major differences in the calculation of the load values > on both systems ? Nope. The FreeBSD box generally will handle a lot more load than a Solaris Box. This is just from personal observation. IMHO, the price/performance ratio just isn't there anymore on the Sparc hardware. We erradicated all the Sparcs from our system finally about a year ago, except for one which had our heavily customized radius server on it which we finally were able to disconnect from the net just a little bit ago. About the only place you'll run into a difference is in a Multi-proccessor vs single processor box. If you had say a 5 processor box, "normal" load values in most cases on most OS's is anything below 5. On a single processor box, anything below 1 is normal. But unless you had 300 processors in the Sparc box. The other real advantage of the Intel platform in my opinion is that if you have something blow up, the chances are that you won't have to look very far for a suitable temporary replacement.... "Oh crap, we just blew the motherboard in the web server.. Hey, why don't we just use this new machine we got for Joe until we get a replacement" - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) AC7DE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Innovation Machine Ltd. P.O. Box 5749 http://www.imach.com/ Helena, MT 59604 Home of PacketFlux Technogies and BackupDNS.com (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect your personal freedoms - visit http://www.lp.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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