Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 16:31:41 -0400 (EDT) From: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: dillon@earth.backplane.com, mhagerty@voyager.net Subject: Re: Article: Network performance by OS Message-ID: <200106162031.f5GKVfm16209@saturn.cs.uml.edu>
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With gratuitously non-standard quoting which I fixed, Matt Dillon writes: > [Matthew Hagerty] >> Here is a surprisingly unbiased article comparing OSes running >> hard core network apps. The results are kind of disturbing, >> with FreeBSD (4.2) coming in last against Linux (RH), Win2k, >> and Solaris (Intel). > > This is old. The guys running the tests blew it in so many ways > that you might as well have just rolled some dice. There's a > slashdot article on it too, and quite a few of the reader comments > on these bozos are correct. I especially like comment #41. > Don't worry, FreeBSD stacks up just fine in real environments. Feel free to post a benchmarking procedure that would let one person produce fair results. Results ought to be reproducable: you, I, and an NT kernel developer all get the same answers. From another post where you tried to list the ways they blew it: > If you intend to push a system to its limits, you damn well better > be prepared to tune it properly or you are just wasting your time. > On any operating system. You will never find joe-user running his > system into the ground with thousands of simultanious connections > and ten thousand files in a mail directory, so it's silly to > configure the system from a joe-user perspective. So every FreeBSD server requires an expensive admin to tune it? That Win2K solution is looking good now. :-) These admins now... they never quit their job at just the wrong moment, people always have a hot-spare admin, or you think one can find and hire a really good admin as soon as needed? Nobody would ever have an unplanned demand that would run the "system into the ground with thousands of simultanious connections and ten thousand files in a mail directory" of course, especially when the admin isn't available. After all, the OS couldn't cope. Wait, wasn't this where FreeBSD was supposed to be really good while Linux and Win2K sucked? Hmmm, interesting. I guess it's fair to shove Linux deep into swap (as pro-FreeBSD benchmarkers always do), but not fair to make FreeBSD handle a large directory? > Slashdot respondants did a pretty good job identifying the problems > - network mbufs, softupdates, Robert here just brought up the > possibility of IDE write caching being turned off, etc etc etc. The It was SCSI. Read the article. > fact that the bozos doing the 'benchmark' knew about sysctl but only > tuned the file descriptor limit is a pretty good indication of how > biased they were. Biased against Win2K maybe, which beat FreeBSD without any tuning at all. FreeBSD got the same treatment as Solaris and Linux did. > I'll bet they didn't even bother compiling up a > kernel... something that is utterly trivial in a FreeBSD system, and > if they did they certainly didn't bother tuning it. Lots of places would not allow this. Heavy tweaking requires heavy documentation to be reproducable by a future admin. It adds cost. There is a "don't break anything" concern. Every other system was in the same boat, so stop complaining. Linux got stuck with 2.2.16-22, even though it comes with friendly interactive kernel config editors. Go on, admit it. The benchmark was fair to FreeBSD, and you just don't like to see the results. BTW I'm serious about seeing your procedure for fair benchmarking. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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