From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Jul 12 21:26:45 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from smtp3.knology.net (user-24-214-63-13.knology.net [24.214.63.13]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id ED8DB37B401 for ; Thu, 12 Jul 2001 21:26:39 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from steve@havk.org) Received: (qmail 1517 invoked from network); 13 Jul 2001 04:26:38 -0000 Received: from user-24-214-56-224.knology.net (HELO bsd.havk.org) (24.214.56.224) by user-24-214-63-13.knology.net with SMTP; 13 Jul 2001 04:26:38 -0000 Received: by bsd.havk.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 91E991A7D2; Thu, 12 Jul 2001 23:26:10 -0500 (CDT) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 23:26:10 -0500 From: Steve Price To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Regarding New FreeBSD BenchMark From Sysadmin Mag (left out a fiew tuning options) Message-ID: <20010712232610.J75539@bsd.havk.org> References: <20010712211356.D75539@bsd.havk.org> <200107130239.f6D2dFD134165@saturn.cs.uml.edu> <20010712220259.E75539@bsd.havk.org> <3B4E71E2.C67AA458@clublinux.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <3B4E71E2.C67AA458@clublinux.org>; from steve@clublinux.org on Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 10:58:26PM -0500 X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 4.3-STABLE i386 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 10:58:26PM -0500, steve wrote: > > Agreed. Benchmarks never tell the whole story. Although I don't know > of any alterior motive for Sysadmin magazine to "create" the test > results, that doesn't mean there couldn't be. It was supposed to be an > "out of the box" test orginally, so let them have their so-called > tests. How many people really use an OS out of the box for a server? What I gather is that they say they tweaked FreeBSD but didn't Linux, so it wasn't out of the box by any means. They could have just as easily tweaked FreeBSD in the wrong way and skewed the results. Maybe not purposefully but it could have resulted that way. > Ouch. That's a bit harsh. I'd hesitate to call Linux a "fad". I can't tell you how many people I run across every week talking up Linux. Many of them are young folks that haven't even used another Unix much less FreeBSD spouting off about how Linux is the greatest and how they want to the next Linus. I live in a small town of about 265,000 people (OK maybe not that small) and I see it almost constantly. Maybe fad isn't the right word - it is hip, it is in, it is cool to use Linux. I'm not saying everyone does this nor that Linux is awful and has no use, just that I've learned to ignore the hype and evaluate what's best for me in any given scenario. YMMV and that's cool. You use what you want I'll do the same. Until you've tried both you really can't make a judgement on way or other. I like Perl, but I've also recently found Ruby. In a recent trivial but real world case I had the occasion to write the same script in both languages and was interested in what I found. While to me Ruby seemed cleaner looking, the Perl implementation was much faster (~3x) until I realized there was a requirement to support integers larger than 2^31 - 1 and Ruby suddenly turned the tides and was ~3x faster than Perl. So what does that say? Not much. Just that I found one case where if I wanted to I could claim that Ruby was faster and therefore far superior to Perl. Taken as whole for everything you can do with each language it should be easy to see that I could find a scenario where one would outshine the other and could shout it from the highest of mountains as being gospel. Only when I spend many years using both can I begin to see where one might be slightly better than the other. I've used Linux since 0.99.1 and have been a FreeBSD committer for 6 years or so, so I think I've done a few tests between the two and know for which situations which OS works best for me. I encourage everyone to do the same if they have the time instead of blindly saying one is better than the other because of one set of test results. -steve To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message