From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu May 24 18: 0:44 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from wilma.widomaker.com (wilma.widomaker.com [204.17.220.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 54AFE37B422 for ; Thu, 24 May 2001 18:00:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from shannon@daydream.shannon.net) Received: from [209.96.179.174] (helo=escape.shannon.net) by wilma.widomaker.com with esmtp (Exim 3.22 #2) id 1535y3-000PD4-00; Thu, 24 May 2001 21:00:39 -0400 Received: from daydream (mail@daydream.shannon.net [192.168.1.10]) by escape.shannon.net (8.11.0/8.8.8) with ESMTP id f4P0YHb02207; Thu, 24 May 2001 20:34:17 -0400 (EDT) Received: from shannon by daydream with local (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 1535YX-0003wR-00; Thu, 24 May 2001 20:34:17 -0400 Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 20:34:17 -0400 From: Shannon Hendrix To: Bsdguru@aol.com Cc: jandrese@mitre.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: technical comparison Message-ID: <20010524203415.A13575@widomaker.com> References: <18.d428b5e.283ed07c@aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <18.d428b5e.283ed07c@aol.com>; from Bsdguru@aol.com on Thu, May 24, 2001 at 05:00:44PM -0400 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 On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 05:00:44PM -0400, Bsdguru@aol.com wrote: > > > 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. > > > > > Are you sure this is still true? The 2.4.x series kernel was supposed to > > have significant networking improvements over the previous kernels. > > I dont know, but I doubt it. There were significant network and memory improvements in the 2.4 release. There were also some improvements that will have to wait for the next release, but overall it is much improved. FreeBSD 4.3 is much improved over 2.x and 3.x, so I'm not sure why that would be considered unusual or surprising. The memory system in Linux is still set up by default to give more speed at the expense of smooth load handling. It seems better, but you have to go into /proc and tune things to get better load handling. > the problem isnt the networking preformance, its the inability of the > memory system and the ethernet drivers to handle overloads properly. > They are modeled in a way that fails in practice. The way I understood it was certain drivers were more affected by this than others. Some were just fine, and handled very high loads. Another problem was multiple ethernet cards, but I forgot what caused that. A lot of that was addressed in the 2.4 release, and it seems to have made a lot of people happier. I can't test the difference because I have nothing but 10mbit ethernet. However, the 2.4 kernel is definitely faster in my day-to-day work, and has allowed me to delay a complete move to FreeBSD 4.x on my workstation. It was that much of a step forward. Now I can wait until I get proper 3D support for my nVidia graphics card. -- "We have nothing to prove" -- Alan Dawkins To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message