From owner-freebsd-current Fri Sep 17 10:20:39 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from out0.mx.skynet.be (out0.mx.skynet.be [195.238.2.35]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0CEC415372 for ; Fri, 17 Sep 1999 10:20:34 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from blk@skynet.be) Received: from [195.238.1.121] (brad.techos.skynet.be [195.238.1.121]) by out0.mx.skynet.be (8.9.3/odie-relay-v1.0) with ESMTP id TAA22582; Fri, 17 Sep 1999 19:20:26 +0200 (MET DST) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: blk@foxbert.skynet.be Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <199909171658.JAA53751@apollo.backplane.com> References: <199909171658.JAA53751@apollo.backplane.com> Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 19:19:58 +0200 To: Matthew Dillon , current@FreeBSD.ORG From: Brad Knowles Subject: Re: 2xPIIIx450 results & NFS results (was More benchmarking stuff...) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 9:58 AM -0700 1999/9/17, Matthew Dillon wrote: > It seems pretty clear to me that this benchmark has been designed > to show-off the netapp in the best possible light and its competitors > in the worst possible light. Well, ok, that may be an overly-harsh > assessment, but it is still true to some degree. The benchmark is > seriously flawed. Might I then request that you help rewrite it so that it performs a much more comprehensive testing of OS/filesystem throughput? Myself, I'd really love to see something that lets you seriously stress your system along the lines of Greg Lehey's rawio, but instead at a higher level. IMO, bonnie sucks worse than postmark, although they're measuring different things. Although it should certainly be forking, whether forking or not I can tell you that creating huge directories is not necessarily a bad simulation of a heavily-used mail server. I've seen mail servers with over 100,000 files in /var/spool/mqueue, both at former employers (like AOL), and at former customer sites (such as some of the largest freemail providers in the world). I can't speak for anything else that the program is supposedly testing, but at least this aspect of performance is one of the most common, and yet most easily dealt with, problems I have run across in all my years of managing large mail systems. That's why directory size is #1 on the hit parade in the presentation I occasionally give entitled "Sendmail Performance Tuning for Large Systems", most recently given at SANE'98. See if you want copies of the slides. -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ____________________________________________________________________ |o| Brad Knowles, Belgacom Skynet NV/SA |o| |o| Systems Architect, News & FTP Admin Rue Col. Bourg, 124 |o| |o| Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.11.11/12.49 B-1140 Brussels |o| |o| http://www.skynet.be Belgium |o| \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ Unix is like a wigwam -- no Gates, no Windows, and an Apache inside. Unix is very user-friendly. It's just picky who its friends are. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message