Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 13:49:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Dragos Ruiu <dr@kyx.net>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@rush.net>, Rajappa Iyer <rsi@panix.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sysadmin article Message-ID: <200106152049.f5FKnOK51754@earth.backplane.com> References: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010615134528.47461H-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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:On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Dragos Ruiu wrote:
:
:> I would heartily endorse having the out of the box FreeBSD install be
:> tuned better...
:>
:> Sysadmin can't be knocked for not doing the tuning as running an out of
:> the box config is what a vast majority of users do, imho, so their
:> performance tests and the poor results from FreeBSD are perfectly valid
:> indication of what can be expected without tuning.
:>
:> Softupdates on by default sounds great to me, as I can't think of any
:> common situations that would be hurt by it. But I'm sure someone will
:> correct me if I'm wrong on this. Now if we could only speed up SMP
:> too...
:
:Well, I think this is especially true in light of the recent decision to
:turn WCE back on by default for IDE.
:
:Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
:robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services
On the otherhand, what these people were testing was a 'high performance'
system. If you intend to push a system to its limits, you damn well
better be prepared to tune it properly or you are just wasting your
time. On any operating system. You will never find joe-user
running his system into the ground with thousands of simultanious
connections and ten thousand files in a mail directory, so it's silly
to configure the system from a joe-user perspective.
Slashdot respondants did a pretty good job identifying the problems -
network mbufs, softupdates, Robert here just brought up the possibility
of IDE write caching being turned off, etc etc etc. The fact that
the bozos doing the 'benchmark' knew about sysctl but only tuned the
file descriptor limit is a pretty good indication of how biased they
were. I'll bet they didn't even bother compiling up a kernel... something
that is utterly trivial in a FreeBSD system, and if they did they
certainly didn't bother tuning it.
-Matt
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