Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 21:37:39 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Rajappa Iyer <rsi@panix.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sysadmin article Message-ID: <20010615213739.B12591@hades.hell.gr> In-Reply-To: <200106150223.f5F2NLW08368@panix1.panix.com>; from rsi@panix.com on Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 10:23:21PM -0400 References: <200106150223.f5F2NLW08368@panix1.panix.com>
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On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 10:23:21PM -0400, Rajappa Iyer wrote: > http://www.sysadminmag.com/articles/2001/0107/0107a/0107a.htm > > Any obvious reasons why FreeBSD performed so poorly for these people? Yes, it's not very difficult to guess why. If you read the tuning(7) manpage in recent 4.x FreeBSD systems you will notice that even the order in which you lay out the partitions on the disks ruding installation time can play a significant role in filesystem speed. Softupdates are disabled by default, and for a good reason too (reliability is more important than raw speed to the people who install FreeBSD for the first time; if it isn't they can always enable softupdates later on). Write-back caching is disabled in the disks, even if they support it. This is yet another step towards making the default installation of FreeBSD as reliable a system as it can be. Installing an operating system (be it FreeBSD, linux, Windows or what else) and failing to tune the system to perform as good as possible for the application, is no decent way of doing a benchmark. And when is comes to benchmarks, you have to tune ALL the systems that are involved. You have to perform the test on identical hardware (if such a thing is ever possible[1]). When doing benchmarks, you have to present a lot more data than a simple bar or line graph with the results, for the benchmarks to be of any practical value to somebody else. An exact description of the hardware involved, details about the installation of the software, tuning decisions and tweaks performed during installation that will make the software perform better for a given application, what application you are interested in and testing with this benchmark, post installation tuning, what software you used for doing the benchmark, was it compiled by you or somebody else? what compiler and tools you used to generate the software of the benchmark, what special options you gave if any, and finally what the benchmark was, how long it took, did it finish successfully or fail, and those infamous charts with the results. You see, there's more to a benchmark than just a few charts, and we have not been given account about any of that by the authors of the articles in question. -giorgos [1] Even disks os the same manufacturer, and the same declared size, speed, characteristics, etc. do have slight differences some times. [-- Sorry about this long rant, but the whole story about this article is starting to get on my nerves :P --] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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