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Date:      Wed, 08 Jan 2003 17:35:12 -0800
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Michal Pasternak <michal@pasternak.w.lub.pl>
Cc:        paul beard <paulbeard@mac.com>, advocacy@freebsd.org, sellis@telus.net
Subject:   Re: [Fwd: web write-up]
Message-ID:  <3E1CD1D0.7D8914B8@mindspring.com>
References:  <3E1C8287.1020506@mac.com> <3E1C9249.551D6932@mindspring.com> <20030108220533.GB18151@pasternak.w.lub.pl>

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Micha=B3 Pasternak wrote:
>         We all know, that 99% of benchmarks and statistics are untrue,
>         but does any of you know about a recent surveys comparing
>         speed of (network|filesystem|vm|anything else) on FreeBSD
>         and Linux?

I don't know of any recent statistics in this area.  You would be
better off asking the question after the end of Februrary, so someone
could point you to the most recent Usenix proceedings, which will
happen about then.


>         I'm especially concerned about softupdates + dirhash compared
>         to ext3fs or reiser.

What specifically would you like to see compared, that's actually
representative of expected real-world performance?  For example,
creating a boatload of files, all in the same directory, is never
likely to happen with real applications, as long as they are written
by people who know what they are doing, and want their performance
to be protable to UNIX systems, in general (one of the problems with
the mail server that started this thread, two yearts ago).

Reiser is very hard for me to comment on; I believe that, even after
they removed preserve lists, it still substantially  infringes US
Patent #5666532 (USL/Novell).

Personally, I also dislike "dirhash", since in my opinion, it does
not scale; it's author admits as much, and, for my money, it is
addressing a symptom rather than a real problem.

Comparing Extent based file systems or log structured file systems
against block clustering-with-hashed-selection filesystems is, I
think, comparing apples and oranges.  They solve different problems,
and the ones I think are most important are the ones that occur in
the acknowledge the old dictium:

	 "The steady state of disks is 'full'"
			-- Kirk McKusick

=2E..meaning that you'd expect more of the system time, percentage-wise,
to be taken up by the operation of a cleaner, on FS's whose designs
did not include intrinsic protection against fragmentation.


If, on the other hand, you have some ideas, then you should pursue
them, and publish your papers at one of the academic conferences.


> NVidia's drivers performance should be
>         also easy to perform.

Notification of completion isn't really a feature of this hardware;
I think the best you will be able to measure is something not very
useful, like "filled triangles permitted by the driver to be queued
to the device, per second, with no knowledge of the real render-rate",
and I don't know how useful that would be, anyway.  Even if I would
personally disagree, most people seem to believe the propaganda that
FreeBSD is not an OS for the desktop, or for games on the desktop.

Taking that into account, though, since the company that made the
cards made the drivers for both the OS's you are imputing a comparison
between, without coming right out and saying it, I expect that they
are as fast as the hardware vendor could driver their hardware.  Any
differences would be in what the programmers learned from previous
implementations (which would favor the drivers implemented later over
those implemented earlier).

In any case, if you think it's possible to compare something that's
really tied to presentation to a human, and do it so it's not a
subjective comparison, you should do it.  You still have time to
submit your paper for the Freenix track for the Summer Usenix.

-- Terry

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