Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 18:32:31 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>, Richard Sharpe <sharpe@ns.aus.com> Cc: developers@FreeBSD.org, FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD performing worse than Linux? Message-ID: <20011128183231.J61580@monorchid.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <15364.39058.354066.940245@caddis.yogotech.com> <20011128182210.I61580@monorchid.lemis.com> <20011128015614.32e30d8b.wes@softweyr.com> <15364.38767.82340.347344@caddis.yogotech.com> <25429.1006933507@critter.freebsd.dk> <15364.38174.938500.946169@caddis.yogotech.com> References: <20011128153817.T61580@monorchid.lemis.com> <15364.38174.938500.946169@caddis.yogotech.com> <20011128015614.32e30d8b.wes@softweyr.com> <15364.38174.938500.946169@caddis.yogotech.com> <25429.1006933507@critter.freebsd.dk> <15364.38767.82340.347344@caddis.yogotech.com> <15364.38174.938500.946169@caddis.yogotech.com> <25429.1006933507@critter.freebsd.dk> <20011128153817.T61580@monorchid.lemis.com> <15364.38174.938500.946169@caddis.yogotech.com>
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I think I made a mistake by not opening this immediately. Certainly I haven't seen any particularly animosity here so far, and Richard can defend himself, so: FreeBSD hackers, meet Richard Sharpe. Richard, meet the hackers. As I said, Richard's a member of the Samba team. He's also going to be working on FreeBSD in the foreseeable future, so his intentions here are completely honourable :-) He's sent me the report, but since I didn't say I would send it to the entire development team, I'll wait for his go-ahead (and the reply to a couple of questions) before sending it on. Greg On Wednesday, 28 November 2001 at 0:41:18 -0700, Nate Williams wrote: >> I've just been talking with a friend of mine from the Samba team. >> He's about to change jobs, and a lot of his work in future will >> involve FreeBSD. He's just been doing some performance testing, and >> while the numbers are pretty even (since he discovered soft updates >> :-), he's noticing some significant performance differences, >> particularly on the TCP/IP area. > > FWIW, I'm seeing this as well. However, this appears to be a new > occurance, as we were using a FreeBSD 3.X system for our reference test > platform. I recently updated it to FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE, and I'm getting > nothing but complaints about broken connections, poor performance, and > very inconsistent results. > > They are now considering installing Linux on this box with the hope that > they can get consistent results. (Unfortunately, FreeBSD 3.X is out > because I convinced them that we needed to upgrade to 4.X due to > security measures, so we can't go back.) > > Note, some of the performance issues were made better by disabling the > TCP newreno implementation, but it's still poor and very inconsistent > for hosts not on the local network, while the Linux box next to it gets > much more consistent results. > > I know my lack of information isn't helping much, and that I've not done > much to help debug the problem. However, all my attempts to track down > what is causing this from a high-level (w/out digging into the code > itself and analyzing tcpdump output) have come up empty. This is obviously something *somebody* (not me) should look in to. On Wednesday, 28 November 2001 at 0:51:11 -0700, Nate Williams wrote: > On Wednesday, 28 November 2001 at 8:45:07 +0100, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: >> In message <15364.38174.938500.946169@caddis.yogotech.com>, Nate Williams writes: >>> Note, some of the performance issues were made better by disabling the >>> TCP newreno implementation, but it's still poor and very inconsistent >>> for hosts not on the local network, while the Linux box next to it gets >>> much more consistent results. >> >> For what it's worth I have disabled newreno at my customer sites as well >> and felt and heard less "bogosity" since. > > It's actually pretty awful. However, even with the fix I merged back > into RELENG_4, the performance with/without newreno is still *much* > worse (in terms of consistantly giving the same results) than the code > in FreeBSD 3.x. > > The interesting thing is that the application that's getting the most > press is one of our field technicians downloading a file over anonymous > ftp by hand, so it's not like we're generating tons of traffic, or > alot of parallel connections. > > The connections hang, abort, and those that complete have numbers that > are *all* over the map. However, when connected to a Linux box on the > same network, none of these bad things occur. :( > > (And, we've verified the network is up by running ping in another > window.) On Wednesday, 28 November 2001 at 18:22:10 +1030, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Wednesday, 28 November 2001 at 1:56:14 -0700, Wes Peters wrote: >> On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 00:41:18 -0700 >> "Nate Williams" <nate@yogotech.com> wrote: >> >>> >>> FWIW, I'm seeing this as well. However, this appears to be a new >>> occurance, as we were using a FreeBSD 3.X system for our reference test >>> platform. I recently updated it to FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE, and I'm getting >>> nothing but complaints about broken connections, poor performance, and >>> very inconsistent results. >>> >>> They are now considering installing Linux on this box with the hope that >>> they can get consistent results. (Unfortunately, FreeBSD 3.X is out >>> because I convinced them that we needed to upgrade to 4.X due to >>> security measures, so we can't go back.) >> >> And they somehow think any variant of Linux is going to be better on >> this point? My recent experience with Linux would say otherwise, >> but that was on an Intel Architecture Labs variant that is somewhat >> out of date, too. > > Well, it ties in with Richard's experience. On Wednesday, 28 November 2001 at 0:56:02 -0700, Nate Williams wrote: >>> FWIW, I'm seeing this as well. However, this appears to be a new >>> occurance, as we were using a FreeBSD 3.X system for our reference test >>> platform. I recently updated it to FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE, and I'm getting >>> nothing but complaints about broken connections, poor performance, and >>> very inconsistent results. >>> >>> They are now considering installing Linux on this box with the hope that >>> they can get consistent results. (Unfortunately, FreeBSD 3.X is out >>> because I convinced them that we needed to upgrade to 4.X due to >>> security measures, so we can't go back.) >> >> And they somehow think any variant of Linux is going to be better on >> this point? > > More to the point, it *IS* better with Linux. :( > > (At least, comparing the latest FreeBSD with the 'latest' version of > some release of Linux. I'm not sure if it's Mandrake, or RedHat, or > what. I wasn't involved in that end of things.) > > I'm still trying to figure out if it's some simple configuration that's > causing the problems, but the field trial folks are starting to get > annoyed with my constant 'excuses' as to why we shouldn't just switch to > Linux. -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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