Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 12:04:13 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> Cc: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Article in pcmag Message-ID: <3BE6F0BD.9F4173C4@mindspring.com> References: <3BE6BC06.356C4CE6@potentialtech.com>
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Bill Moran wrote: > There was recently an article in pcmag that shows that Linux > running Samba is faster than W2K. I thought it would be interesting > to see the same tests run on Samba+FreeBSD, so I sent an email. > Here is the article: > http://www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s%253D1474%2526a%253D16554,00.asp > > My thought was that this could be good publicity for FreeBSD, if > they run the test with the system properly tuned. If anyone wants > to send email, I couldn't find an address for Oliver Kaven (who > wrote the article) so I sent one to Davis Janowski > (davis_janowski@ziffdavis.com) who appears to be Oliver's boss. Best not to play in the road, unless it's your turf. They didn't say which clients they were using; because of past discussions, I'm going to bet that these were older clients, and not NT Workstation/2000/XP clients, which perform significantly worse under Linux than Windows, because of the data conversions required. There is also some obvious Linux bias in the cut off on number of clients; extrapolation of the curves shows at a small number of addiioal clients, there are some additional heels in the curves, and at least three of them have the Linux numbers so close to converging on the Windows numbers, that the lines would be bound to cross. It's also pretty clear that the limiting factor was memory utilization of the per client fixed cost, and that as soon as that was converted from cache to client state, the Linux box augered in -- I epxect a FreeBSD box to do the same, and the only fix would be to reduce per connection overhead in the UNIX in question, and in the SAMBA server code itself. It is pretty clear that NT has a bigger initial footprint, but the per client footprint is smaller, and it's more efficient at the data miss handling, where it has to load from disk, rather than serve out of cache. Perhaps the most telling point on where the heels were is the amount of RAM in each box, relative to the heel-over. I don't see a CPU utilization plot vs. number of clients, so the graph seems to me to incorrectly correlate CPU speed, while glossing over relative RAM size, which appears to be the determining factor. From my own similar measurements in the past, I expect that the CPUs are vastly overpowered for the NT, and might be much closer to being consumed on the Linux side of things. The bottom line is that I would not be happy to see FreeBSD show similar curves to Linux, even if it beat Windows on the limited number of clients in the test. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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