From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jun 24 11:13:39 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from Genesis.Denninger.Net (kdhome-2.pr.mcs.net [205.164.6.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A96C914C4E for ; Thu, 24 Jun 1999 11:13:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from karl@Genesis.Denninger.Net) Received: (from karl@localhost) by Genesis.Denninger.Net (8.9.3/8.8.2) id MAA08066; Thu, 24 Jun 1999 12:58:56 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <19990624125855.A8051@Denninger.Net> Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 12:58:55 -0500 From: Karl Denninger To: Doug Cc: Mark Newton , green@unixhelp.org, drosih@rpi.edu, grog@lemis.com, mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Microsoft performance (was: ...) References: <19990624095801.A7559@Denninger.Net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i In-Reply-To: ; from Doug on Thu, Jun 24, 1999 at 10:54:37AM -0700 Organization: Karl's Sushi and Packet Smashers X-Die-Spammers: Spammers will be LARTed and the remains fed to my cat Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, Jun 24, 1999 at 10:54:37AM -0700, Doug wrote: > We're adding some machines at work for (essentially) cgi > processing only. It was never considered to use anything less than 2 cpu > boxes, and the current round of testing is going so well that we're > seriously considering 4 cpu boxes because they are not that much more > expensive and our processing is highly CPU bound. I agree that redundancy > is a good thing, but at some point the increased network latency exceends > the point of diminishing returns for the redundancy factor. > > In short, increasing SMP efficiency should really be a priority > for N>2 systems. Agreed. But this is a BIG job, because to do that you have to solve the "one big kernel lock" problem and go to fine-grained locking. This is a non-trivial job. > > I had an NT machine that ran file and print service for my office (before > > I sold the company). I replaced it with SAMBA on the same hardware. > > > > Performance more than doubled, and the ONLY thing that I changed was the > > operating system. > ..... > However notice I said, "when my box is running." So > far it's fallen down on NFS issues so many times that it's currently > sidelined. What release are you running? There ARE NFS issues - most of which can be solved. I had to do this all the time running an ISP with a home-grown cluster system that did exactly that - all "real" data was sitting on a couple of big RAID arrays - and served via NFS. > Now if we were talking about a uni-processor system doing nothing > but serving web pages from local disk, I know I'd be kicking some serious > ass, but that model isn't the real world anymore. Especially as Network > Appliance boxes become more and more common (and they will be, fast and > furious) multi-processor and NFS are for all practical purposes already > the reality now, and will only be more so in the future. That's the world I lived in (except that I used FreeBSD for the NFS servers as well!) and done properly it works EXTREMELY well. -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@denninger.net) Web: fathers.denninger.net I ain't even *authorized* to speak for anyone other than myself, so give up now on trying to associate my words with any particular organization. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message