From owner-freebsd-advocacy Tue Mar 21 15:33:24 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (news-ma.rhein-neckar.de [193.197.90.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C41E37BBEB for ; Tue, 21 Mar 2000 15:33:14 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: from bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (uucp@localhost) by news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with bsmtp id AAA03036 for freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 00:33:08 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id XAA68348 for freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org; Tue, 21 Mar 2000 23:38:38 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: 21st Century Unix - web serving Date: 21 Mar 2000 23:38:38 +0100 Message-ID: <8b8tle$22nj$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <200003210130.KAA74668@daniel.sobral> <38D74CB3.DF3AA476@newsguy.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Daniel C. Sobral wrote: > more important, in my opinion, is FreeBSD ability to handle *LOAD*. You > know, when you just have been slashdotted and get a sudden peak of > access way above the normal? Well, FreeBSD handles it. It doesn't do any > H0H0 magic or anything, it crawls as you would expect it to, but it > _continues to work_. That's not the case with Linux. With Linux, you get > into a trashing situation, where useful work simply ceases until the > peak is gone. I wish somebody would put some substance to such anecdotal stories. I'm currently quite close to a Linux box which gets slashdot-like effects (basically caused by minor access spikes and a badly written backend that causes the load to explode), and so far it seems to hold up quite well. Maybe Thomas Graichen's "Performance Comparison" talk at LT2K will offer some factual observations for a change. And FreeBSD certainly doesn't work magic. A few months ago, I did a simple test. Ten processes, each one allocated some memory and ran in a loop doing nothing but continuously writing a byte to each page of its chunk of memory. I chose the process count and memory allocation to cover 1.5x the size of the real memory of the box. When I started the test, the hard disk light lit up solidly and for all pratical purposes the box ground to a halt. No more movement under X11. No more switching back to a text console. No more network login. I watched for some time with amusement and finally pressed the reset button. (Should we take this to -chat?) -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message