Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 05:28:44 -0700 From: "Gilbert Gong" <ggong@cal.alumni.berkeley.edu> To: <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org> Subject: submit article to sys admin magazine? Message-ID: <009a01c0f984$8c64f600$786b85d1@harvestberkeley.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
After reading Michael's post at: http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_story.php3?story_id=2112 and exchanging a few emails with him, I've became convinced it might be reasonable to try to write an article and submit it to sys admin magazine, in re: tuning a freebsd box properly. The goal would be to demonstrate the effect tuning a box properly has on performance. The technique would be to take a stock FreeBSD box, run some benchmarks on it, then rerun those benchmarks after tuning(7) it properly. Questions: 1) Is anyone already working on something like this? If so, perhaps I should not bother :) 2) Can anyone suggest some benchmarks which would be both somewhat meaningful and relatively easy to implement/duplicate? I thought it might be good to give numbers for some kind of http, email, and disk benchmark. Looking through the ports, I saw what might look interesting were: httperf, postal, and postmark. httperf gives me some strange errors, some of which atleast seem to be caused by bugs in httperf, ie: httperf --hog --ser=test-server --wsess=100,50,0 --rate 100 --timeout 5 httperf --hog --timeout=5 --client=0/1 --server=test-server --port=80 --uri= / --rate=100 --send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --wsess=100,50,0.000 assertion "obj->ref_count > 0" failed: file "object.c", line 179 Abort (core dumped) It doesn't core dump every time, only sometimes.. Anyone have any experience with this tool, or have a better one to suggest? postal is also an interesting program, but it doesn't seem to generate statistics. It just basically throws as much email at a server as it can. Which makes it a little harder to use as a benchmark. What seems the most obvious thing to do to get around that is to either write a new mail benchmark, or run the program for a certain length of time, and then postprocess the mail log on the server machine to see how many mails were actually delivered in what amount of time. Finally, I haven't tried postmark yet, and I remember many of the caveats that were mentioned about it on the lists the past few weeks (or however long it's been) but I thought it might be interesting because it was in that other article. This is my setup so far: test-server: P3 600 256MB ram (I can add more, I've got about 768MB sitting around to split between the server and client test boxes) Supermicro P6SBU motherboard onboard aic7890/91 Ultra2 SCSI adapter IBM DNES-309170W SA30 (8gb scsi hd, at 80MB/s, tagged queueing enabled) 3com 3c905b-tx test-client1: P3 400 192MB ram IBM-DTTA-371440 (ide hd at UDMA33) kingston 21143-based nic test-client2: Celeron 400 128MB ram Maxtor 90645D3 (ide hd at UDMA33) onboard intel pro 100+ I can probably get a hold of more client type machines too if it's needed. I would really appreciate any comments, suggestions, or feedback. I will even take kindly to well-meaning flames. Thanks, Gilbert To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?009a01c0f984$8c64f600$786b85d1>