From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 31 10:32:17 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA26014 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 31 Jan 1996 10:32:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from covina.lightside.com (covina.lightside.com [198.81.209.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA26003 for ; Wed, 31 Jan 1996 10:32:13 -0800 (PST) Received: by covina.lightside.com (Smail3.1.28.1 #6) id m0thhK7-0009ahC; Wed, 31 Jan 96 10:32 PST Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 10:31:56 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby To: Peter Wemm cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Good news -- pipe stuff In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On 31 Jan 1996, Peter Wemm wrote: > jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco) writes: > > >> One interesting note, I benchmark FreeBSD vs. Linux (and used to SVR4) > >> regularly in order to evaluate places where performance might/should > >> be improved. I am *brutal* to FreeBSD, but it is getting difficult to > >> find places where it can easily be improved (some of the performance > >> "nits" are due to differences in philosophy and not actual performance > >> problems.) With the latest pipe improvements, I am running out of steam. > >> Indeed, my goal is to "find" performance problems. If anyone has a "cache" > >> of programs to show performance bottlenecks, please email them to me. > >> They will be used to improve FreeBSD's performance, and if I don't > >> do it, DG, BDE or someone else will work on the code. > >> > >> There is another layer of improvements that I have been thinking about, but > >> those require more involved work, and I want to work on easier stuff right > >> now :-). Brain vacation time :-). > >> > >> I would suggest taking a look into uptime benchmark. Make FreeBSD with > >> 50-100 simultaneous users, WWW server, news server, ftp server and lots of > >> nfs in the same machine to stay up for at least weeks in row, instead of > >> days. Popularity of the results is guaranteed, and that is the benchmark > >> professionals value the most. Another thing to look into, although I don't have a benchmark on this, but FreeBSD has a nasty tendency to "bind" during heavy VM/disk activity. I don't know if this is because the IDE driver is CPU intensive, or if this affects people (to a lesser extent) with SCSI drives. It's just that when the system starts paging out to disk, activity in other windows freezes up too. I have 24MB of RAM on my box at home, and notice this quite often, which is even more surprising since I don't push my system more than, say, running a copy of Netscape, emacs, pine, and maybe a compile. Speaking of VM, I set up a system with only 8MB of RAM running FreeBSD, and even though we made a 24MB swap partition, occasionally it fills up. Both boxes are running 2.1.0-RELEASE. If it is not too difficult, I would be REALLY grateful if we could add functionality to add swapfiles and swap partitions to a running system. Even better would be the ability to remove the swapfile without rebooting. Linux (and most SVR4's) have had this functionality for a LONG time. As it is, our BSD limitation of only swapping to the b slice of any particular partition is EXTREMELY frustrating in such situations where extra swap is temporarily needed. Thanks, and keep up the great work! ---Jake