From owner-freebsd-current Thu Jul 23 11:35:17 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA06324 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Thu, 23 Jul 1998 11:35:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu (khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu [18.24.4.193]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA06295 for ; Thu, 23 Jul 1998 11:35:08 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu) Received: (from wollman@localhost) by khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA19868; Thu, 23 Jul 1998 14:34:11 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from wollman) Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 14:34:11 -0400 (EDT) From: Garrett Wollman Message-Id: <199807231834.OAA19868@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> To: Lee Reese Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Viability of -current for Usenet News In-Reply-To: <35B73B60.41C67EA6@gwinnett.com> References: <35B73B60.41C67EA6@gwinnett.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG < said: > problems with the RAID controller and Linux in its present state. Could > anyone give any reasons why FreeBSD may be a superior OS for such an > application so I can convince the Sysadmin to switch? Thanks. These sorts of questions are always fraught with danger, since they tend to degenerate rather quickly into religious wars. I am personally running what-was-and-will-again-be a major transit news server on a FreeBSD box (what else would I use?) and have noted some good points and some bad points. Good points: with the 640 MB of memory it has now, this box really screams. FreeBSD's agressive filesystem caching ensures that important files like dhistory are kept in memory all of the time. This machine can keep up with 14 simultaneous full feeds and still idle half the time. Bad points: there are still some lingering kernel bugs which are causing instability. There is a VM/buffer-cache coherency problem that I believe is still catching me from time to time, and should I ever actually run out of memory a whole range of problems can be triggered. Right now, top reports: last pid: 765; load averages: 1.21, 1.39, 1.19 14:33:12 130 processes: 1 running, 129 sleeping CPU states: 12.4% user, 0.0% nice, 8.1% system, 1.2% interrupt, 78.3% idle Mem: 450M Active, 13M Inact, 24M Wired, 139M Cache, 8347K Buf, 1288K Free Swap: 256M Total, 128K Used, 256M Free It could be a bit better. -GAWollman -- Garrett A. Wollman | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same wollman@lcs.mit.edu | O Siem / The fires of freedom Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA| - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message