From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Nov 18 2:32:45 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CA03F37B4C5 for ; Sat, 18 Nov 2000 02:32:41 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 90508 invoked by uid 100); 18 Nov 2000 10:32:40 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14870.23240.379989.419970@guru.mired.org> Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 04:32:40 -0600 (CST) To: Jeff Wyman Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: SMP: FreeBSD vs. Linux In-Reply-To: <7559685@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jeff Wyman types: > First off, please respond to my email address, as I have too much mail to > subscribe to yet another *BSD-related list. > > I'm going to be implementing a Compaq Proliant 4000 sometime soon as > a postgresql database server (quad Pentium 66), and I'm trying to decide > which open-sourced SMP OS would be a better choice. I could try either and > pound them out with dnetc or seti for a few days, but I don't have a whole > lot of time for that. > > I know little of Linux or FreeBSD's support for SMP, so I'd really like to > hear of some unbiased personal experiences with the two, although I would > ultimately prefer to end up using FreeBSD as my final solution here. All the reports indicate that Linux SMP is better than -stable. SMP in -stable uses one lock for almost everything, which serializes things that don't need to be serialized. -current has gone to a new generation of SMP code (from, or influenced by, BSDI) and so works much better. However, it's not ready for production yet. If you can afford to wait for 5.0-RELEASE (2nd/3rd quarter next year?), or can upgrade to it when it comes out, you are then back to the standard FreeBSD vs. Linux arguments. If you have to have the fastest thing you can get now, then Linux SMP will provide better performance.