From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 13 20:46:06 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id UAA19506 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 13 Aug 1997 20:46:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from tok.qiv.com ([204.214.141.211]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA19481 for ; Wed, 13 Aug 1997 20:45:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by tok.qiv.com (8.8.6/8.8.5) with UUCP id WAA07486; Wed, 13 Aug 1997 22:45:22 -0500 (CDT) Received: from localhost (jdn@localhost) by acp.qiv.com (8.8.6/8.8.5) with SMTP id WAA01585; Wed, 13 Aug 1997 22:35:17 -0500 (CDT) X-Authentication-Warning: acp.qiv.com: jdn owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 22:35:17 -0500 (CDT) From: "Jay D. Nelson" To: Shawn Ramsey cc: Paul Dekkers , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD is slower than Linux !? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk You're quite right -- but that's dangerous on a production system no matter what the OS. I should have kept my fingers quite. You see, I look at FreeBSD as a _production_ system. And frankly, I've found that it does as good a job and in some areas better that commercial Unices like AIX, Solaris and AT&TSVR4. In fact I use it in just such an environment. My experience with Linux is that it poops out under load -- and some of the distributions aren't much better than NT. Blame the pud whackers who put together the distributions -- not the kernel. My point was simply that when you put both under a real life multiuser load, the differences are fairly obvious. And frankly, I wouldn't use async mounts for anything other than news. -- Jay On Wed, 13 Aug 1997, Shawn Ramsey wrote: >> 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) > > > -- Jay