From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed May 23 13:48:10 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from imo-m07.mx.aol.com (imo-m07.mx.aol.com [64.12.136.162]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7866937B424 for ; Wed, 23 May 2001 13:48:02 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Bsdguru@aol.com) Received: from Bsdguru@aol.com by imo-m07.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v30.22.) id n.84.1653a8bf (25306) for ; Wed, 23 May 2001 16:47:57 -0400 (EDT) From: Bsdguru@aol.com Message-ID: <84.1653a8bf.283d7bfc@aol.com> Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 16:47:56 EDT Subject: Re: technical comparison To: hackers@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Windows sub 139 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Tell them to fire 20K packets/second at the linux box and watch it crumble. Linux has lots of little kludges to make it appear faster on some benchmarks, but from a networking standpoint it cant handle significant network loads. Bryan > > Hi, > > > > I appoligize if this is the improper channel for this sort of > >discussion, but it is in the best interests of the FreeBSD following, > >atleast, within my orginization. > > > > I work in an environment consisting of 300+ systems, all FreeBSD > >and Solaris, along with lots of EMC and F5 stuff. Our engineering division > >has been working on a dynamic content server and search engine for the > >past 2.5 years. They have consistently not met up to performance and > >throughput requirements and have always blamed our use of FreeBSD for it. > >We have humored them time and time again; i.e. they once claimed the lack > >of some sort of RAID was keeping them from meeting their requirements, > >when he had already thrown brute amounts of hardware at their application. > >When we setup a load-testing environment with multiple types of RAIDs, all > >the systems, including the one without any sort of RAID performed > >identically. And poorly, at that. > > > > We have had a recent change in departmental structure, which > >unfortunately, weakened the more technical side of the top of the food > >chain. They have taken this as another opportunity to push for Linux-use > >within our environment. We do not want, nor feel the need for introducing > >another OS into the environment. > > > > The following are the points that the head of engineering claimed > >were their requirements and our shortcoming, which Linux would handle > >well: > > > >--- > > > >a) A machine that has fast character operations > > > >b) A *supported* Oracle client > > > >c) A filesystem that will be fast in light of tens of thousands of > > files in a single directory (maybe even hundreds of thousands) > > > >Requirement a) means that it won't run well on a Sparc processor as > >they are notoriously bad at character addressing, and since search > >makes extensive use of character operations (as does *any* web > >application server for that matter), using a Sparc processor will be a > >waste since the x86 architecture (AMD's and Crusoe's especially) do it > >much better. > > > >Requirement b) means it won't be FreeBSD. Yes, you can run Linux apps > >under emulation, but I'd bet dollars for doughnuts that this will be a > >support nightmare if we can even get it to work. > > > >Requirement c) means it won't be Solaris or FreeBSD since neither of > >them have a filesystem which handles this effectively. > > > >Linux on Intel fits the bill because it meets these three requirements > >*very* effectively. > > > >--- > > > > I find them to be mostly silly points -- (a) touching on integer > >math -- pretty moot point given the real meat of this. (b) is wrong, since > >there is a native port of the oracle client and (c) is just silly -- I'm > >sure softupdates on a modern BSD ufs is loads faster than ext2fs. > > > > Folks, please give me some real technical ammo -- reference > >internals, give a real technical comparison if possible. I don't believe > >this is some lame FreeBSD/Linux comparison -- I'm simply trying to > >tactfully and effectively deal with a zealot. :-) > > > > Any help would be greatly appreciated. > > > > -charles. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message