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Date:      Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:45:46 -0500
From:      "Dieter BSD" <dieterbsd@engineer.com>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   FreeBSD for serious performance? (was: Re: 9.x -- New Install -- serious partition misalignment)
Message-ID:  <20121209014547.238070@gmx.com>

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Ronald writes:
> This probably wouldn't be such a big deal if we were just talking about
> Linux.  But FreeBSD has always prided itself on being a serious OS for
> serious people with serious work to do... like major server farms and
> such.  In the context of high-end applications on high-end hardware where
> people are often trying to squeeze out that last drop of performance,

Linux is certainly a steaming pile of crap. BSD is orders of magnitude
better, but hey, that doesn't take much.

But don't brag about high-end hardware.  But FreeBSD has dropped support
for even semi-high-end hardware (DEC Alpha). So I'm stuck running it on
AMD64. Nothing against AMD, they did what they could to try and make a silk
purse (amd64) out of a sow's ear (x86). But even getting what passes for
a high quality board in amd64/x86 land with good reviews doesn't compare.
The firmware is absolute crap, and it's not like it is something you can
ignore. BTW, real high end hardware is redundant, better than mil-spec,
and provides better than 5-9s uptime. Been there, done that.

Several chips/features aren't supported properly. PRs sit for years on end.

> Performance has been degraded by a whopping 75% !

Having a 4KiB misalignment is nothing compared with not having NCQ
support. (Which even linux has, btw.) 25% performance would be a massive
upgrade. Or even worse, having the disk driver go into an infinite loop
with interrupts blocked, so *nothing* happens and all your incoming data
is lost until you manually intervene.

Speaking of alignment, I still get "partition 1 does not end on a
track boundary" messages. FreeBSD has no clue where the track boundaries
are and neither do I. Disks have used varying numbers of sectors/track
for longer than FreeBSD has existed.

This is your idea of serious?



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