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	Wed, 13 Aug 1997 19:35:46 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 19:35:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: Shawn Ramsey <shawn@luke.cpl.net>
To: "Jay D. Nelson" <jdn@qiv.com>
cc: Paul Dekkers <psd@worldaccess.nl>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: FreeBSD is slower than Linux !?
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> Hmm... It might be revealing if you tried all of that with a couple of
> compiles and a tar of /usr running simultaneously. Final combined
> times may be more revealing.
> 
> -- Jay
> 
> On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Paul Dekkers wrote:
> 
> >Hi
> >
> >I did some speed tests and I'd like to hear some reaction about this.
> >
> >	Linux	FreeBSD
> >dd	2.61	4.95	dd if=/dev/zero of=/test bs=1024 count=5000
> >gzip	12.50	11.01	gzip -9 test
> >gunzip	3.86	8.12
> >sync	4.21	0.9	-> So it seems FreeBSD writes everything to 
> >			   disk directly?! WHY? This makes FreeBSD
> >			   much slower!
> >unzips	4.45	41.92	decompress the sendmail distr
> >compil	353.79	371.87	compile sendmail (makesendmail)
> >
> >Yes, I used the same (slow) disk on my i486
> >But I was really surprised discovering that FreeBSD is much slower in disk
> >access than Linux, so why is the filesystem called FFS (fast-filesystem?!)
> >;-)
> >
> >But, my main question -> I think FreeBSD is that slow because it writes
> >everything to disk directly, without a good cache. Why is this like it is?
> >This does not make FreeBSD very attractive for me to use as a fileserver
> >(nfs or samba) or e.g. a mail server.

Do be fair, I think you should mount the FreeBSd disks asyncronously. By
default, it is set to Synchronously. Linux, at least it used to be this
way, is mounted asynch. Disk access is HUGELY increases under FreeBSD if
it is set to asynch. (mount -o async /dev/filesystem)