From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jun 15 13:49:36 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from earth.backplane.com (earth-nat-cw.backplane.com [208.161.114.67]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8B38737B403; Fri, 15 Jun 2001 13:49:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@earth.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by earth.backplane.com (8.11.3/8.11.2) id f5FKnOK51754; Fri, 15 Jun 2001 13:49:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 13:49:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon Message-Id: <200106152049.f5FKnOK51754@earth.backplane.com> To: Robert Watson Cc: Dragos Ruiu , Alfred Perlstein , Rajappa Iyer , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sysadmin article References: 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 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message