Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 13:38:53 -0600 (MDT) From: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com> To: Don Wilde <don@partsnow.com> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [Fwd: Freeware] Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.980422132113.13481B-100000@alive.znep.com> In-Reply-To: <353E34E3.308E0840@partsnow.com>
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On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Don Wilde wrote: > I just got this in response to my 'Challenge' posted in various places. Sounds > like SPEC might be open to working with us. In looking over the solution SPEC really can't do much. You can't have the organization responsible for unbiased creation and recording of benchmark results subsidizing one vendor's tests. They have donated a copy of SPECweb96 to an Apache Group member for testing, though, but setting up a decent network to use it on is another issue because it requires ugly OS configurations and the license is location-limited. The fact is that all the top results there take $$$ worth of hardware, not just for the server but for some massive clients too. That is hard for most free software projects to deal with unless a member is lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right resources to borrow. > provided by Novell, it seems that what they did to achieve that number was to > open up massive bandwidth in hardware.. I don't have any systems that have 5 PCI > slots for 100Base-T ethernet cards, and I don't have any P-][ 300Mhz chips > laying around. SCSI-3 we can do, fast-wide disks ditto. Do we have Fibre Channel > or SSC boards available to us? Is ATM stable yet? To kick your web benchmark results up high, you need to shove in interfaces with big MTUs. > > It'd be interesting to see how close we can get to that with less hardware, > playing the same game that the other vendors do [RELEASE: FreeBSD/Apache > Achieves 75% of Novell's SPECweb96 performance with 2/3 the Processor Speed!!!]. > Alternatively, presenting a real-world system would be more valuable to real > users. Comments? > > http://www.specbench.org/osg/web96/results/res98q2/web96-980322-02570.html is > the URL of the Novell results, and webmaster@specbench.org will get to them. If you want to push FreeBSD based on web server benchmarks, you would be better off doing so using Zeus (http://www.zeus.co.uk/) if you can get Zeus to go for making a recent available version on FreeBSD, since there isn't much that can keep up with Zeus, in general, although SGI is saying their IRIX-ized NS Enterprise can top it at times. Take a look at http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/webserver98/bench.html and http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/webserver98/bench2.html This has Apache on Solaris and Linux, and it uses zdbench, but the results are quite clear. Unlike many previous published benchmarks, this is not a result of a misconfigured Apache (well, not an obviously misconfigured Apache anyway; I walked them through the config for Apache on the Linux box, and someone else was with them to verify that things were workingright), and changing the OS to FreeBSD isn't going to improve results by a factor of two or three times. OTOH, the Linux box was running with a single CPU enabled against dual CPUs on the other Intel boxes, and I'm not sure offhand how the Intel hardware compare to what Solaris was running on. Using 1.3 can probably give you a 10-40% boost, but Apache is not optimized for benchmark testing like Enterprise and IIS are and trying to show it kicking ass in that area is, for now, not overly productive. You could perhaps do better if you setup a complete dynamic content thing, since a well written Apache module generating dynamic content can be faster than serving static content. Once you factor in reliability and other aspects of performance under load, you can well end up with a "faster" solution using Apache on FreeBSD than something like IIS but that doesn't show up in benchmark numbers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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