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Date:      Tue, 13 Aug 1996 18:39:09 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Tony Kimball <alk@think.com>
To:        michaelv@HeadCandy.com
Cc:        dennis@etinc.com, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD vs. NT Stability 
Message-ID:  <199608132339.SAA09454@compound.Think.COM>

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Quoth Michael L. VanLoon on Mon, 12 August:
: >This is all very nice, but on a macro level NT has two very obvious
: >problems to consider:
: >1) Its rather new...
: >2) It was written by Microsoft
: 
: And, how do these affect NT's performance?  (Or, threading vs. process
: context switching, in general?)
: 

Well, it means that you can't run the same benchmarks for one thing:
It won't run standard thread code, nor will it run standard
multiprocess code.  In fact NT's performance metric for most classic
benchmarks will be precisely 0.  It also means that one is
well-justified in inferring that system uptime will be short enough so
that many performance measurements (those relating to very long
running jobs) will be mooted by stability problems.

Actually, my impression is that 4.0 is quite an improvement over past
incarnations in terms of both robustness and efficiency, although it
does suck memory badly, so the historically justified induction may
break down for NT 4.0.  

Such benchmarks seem of questionable relevance anyhow -- NT is not
selected for performance -- or for compatibility in environments where
NetWare is absent.  NT is selected to run a GUI, and to run specific
commercial applications which aren't generally available on unix or bsd
systems anyhow, so unix and bsd get a big goose-egg performance metric.









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