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Date:      Tue, 03 Aug 1999 21:17:42 -0500
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        Rick Hamell <hamellr@hamell.hpc1.com>, bitter@noah.org, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Need comparative data 
Message-ID:  <199908040217.VAA83867@nospam.hiwaay.net>
In-Reply-To: Message from Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>  of "Tue, 03 Aug 1999 11:58:42 %2B0930." <19990803115842.L62948@freebie.lemis.com> 

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Greg Lehey writes:
> 
> This is a popular opinion which is IMO unfounded.  Yes, FreeBSD
> appears to handle high loads better (the Gartner Group report that
> somebody referred to suggests 40% more throughput), but you've got to
> be careful with any kind of benchmark.  Microsoft has found an area
> where it can prove that NT beats the hell out of either FreeBSD or
> Linux.  It's not a typical application, needless to say, but it goes
> to show that you need to be very careful in what you state.

If I remember history right, back in the 2.0.0 or 2.0.5 days there was a
comparison of Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris x86. The Solaris results were
unmemorable other than both Linux and FreeBSD usually beat it, but not
always. Linux was faster than FreeBSD at small file tasks. Linux was
faster than FreeBSD up to about 25 processes. FreeBSD cleanly scaled up
to about 400 processes when Linux buckled at 100. By "buckled" I mean
internal inefficiencies started to make additional processes more
expensive to run than on a lightly loaded machine. Somebody at the time
attributed this behaviour to Linux using a simple linear table to manage
processes while FreeBSD used a hashed table.

Think the above is somehow related to the Modern Urban Legend which 
claims Linux is a better desktop machine, FreeBSD is a better server, 
as at the keyboard Linux seemed faster than FreeBSD.


--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.




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