Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 01:42:00 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> To: rob@arpa.com (Rob Misiak-Rishaw) Cc: freebsd-chat@freefall.freebsd.org, kessler@celebration.net Subject: Re: benchmark Message-ID: <199611200642.BAA07057@dyson.iquest.net> In-Reply-To: <199611200505.AAA23865@in-addr.arpa.com> from "Rob Misiak-Rishaw" at Nov 20, 96 00:05:07 am
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> Hi all, > > A customer of mine that I do consulting for is moving some of their services > like mail, web, and DNS from an ISP to their site. They plan to do all of > these on NT servers (even DNS -- bleh!). I tried to explain that some flavour > of UNIX would be a much better choice, but they think that UNIX is a dead > thing... > I am not answering your question -- but, since this is -chat... :-)... Y'know, I have the same problem at one of the places where I work -- NT is good, UNIX is dead. Sometimes even my expertise at making things work quickly and efficiently is discounted because recently most of that has been focused in the U**X direction. There is alot of dis/mis information out there. A good example of NT's efficiency follows: We are working on a prototype of a device, which relies on a GUI interface. Because of the "way that the winds blow" we are captive to the NT world. Specifically, Visual Basic makes programs "easy to write." That is unadulterated hogwash for sure... We are having to put 64MB on a 486 for a simple device that would likely have needed 16MB or less if using FreeBSD with XFree86(or Xaccel for that matter). If we could have "done it right" with an R4000 and a very efficient embedded OS/GUI we would also have gotten by with 16MB or less (probably significantly less.) NT and Visual Basic causes the little hard drive to rattle away with 32MB (with the terrible performance that one usually gets when running under NT while paging...) It is really pathetic. Now, we are going to have to "make up" for the "easy to write" aspects by spending time optimizing a system that would have had no real problems if we had chosen a better path. Note that I have a document from Microsoft extolling the virtues of their FIFO paging policy, and frankly, I couldn't disagree more with it. Actually, I am humored by it. (Or would be, if NT's performance wouldn't be a party to such severe problems.) Note that the NT perf problems aren't just due to the kernel, but also due to the seductive development environments like Visual Basic. I usually do daemons (or services in the NT world) and things like that. My NT stuff usually runs very well. It is the bloat-ware and lack of knowledge that make projects so worrysome and painful. We are very much getting into the "hack it together" phase of our profession -- ANYONE can program now, right? The short-term mentality of corporations strikes again -- skill and craftsmanship don't appear to be nearly as highly regarded as once was. Short sighted development appears to cause a lot of waste, and then with the process so broken, they are still talking about "reusability." The C code that I have been writing is very reusable (and I have been doing so) -- cut and paste is my "friend." Of course, none of our VB code is effectively reusable at all. :-(. So, it isn't just that U**X is dead -- it is that everything is dead except Microsoft (bloat|slow)-ware... If Microsoft decided to sell MSDOS 3.2 as the latest/greatest OS -- they could get by with it. Oh, that's right, they did!!! In fact, MSDOS 5.0 was better, right?!?!? WinNT is better than that, of course, it is just the MSDOS of the '90s... Wrong technical solution to the problem, but it doesn't matter, because of the fact that Microsoft can sell it. They have traded a featureless, non-OS for an OS and tools that are severely bloated and sluggish. FreeBSD will easily be able to keep up and surpass WinNT in the performance arena, as long as there is interest in it. Microsoft doesn't have to care about performance. Alot of orgs are happy with mediocre performance. This is followed by my condescending and frustrated *sigh*. John
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