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Date:      Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:27:53 +0200
From:      Szilveszter Adam <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu>
To:        freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: An interesting read...
Message-ID:  <20010614092753.A13828@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu>
In-Reply-To: <3B28134D.4607540F@acuson.com>; from djohnson@acuson.com on Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 06:28:45PM -0700
References:  <20010613192426.B1035@superhero.org> <3B28134D.4607540F@acuson.com>

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On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 06:28:45PM -0700, David Johnson wrote:
> Erich Zigler wrote:
> 
> > I'm taking the results of said tests with a grain of salt. Considering that
> > FreeBSD was the lowest in almost everything. Including network performance.
> > They showed that Windows 2000 even beat FreeBSD in this arena. It's worth a
> > read.
> 
> I sure hope Microsoft paid the author in a timely manner...

The article is available online:

http://www.sysadminmag.com/current/0107a/0107a.htm

and, as was already discussed on the Hungarian FreeBSD users list, it
mostly hits upon the usual suspects:

- threading is not as efficient on FreeBSD as it is on some other OSs. We
  know this (esp in SMP situations). 
- File system performance lagging because of sync mounts and no softupdates
  (the authors tested with default installs) we know this too.
- It supplies a rehash of the controversy of using separate processes in
  daemons to handle new tasks versus using threads and using blocking vs
  non blocking TCP/IP calls. The author clearly states his preference for
  asynchronous threads and non-blocking TCP/IP calls. (He is from the
  company that makes the Lyris mailing list server)
- Author states that in his test (Using 4.2) he was unable to make FreeBSD
  serve more than 2500 connections simultaneously while testing email
  delivery to a test list. 

Contrary to expectations, w2k is not first on the list, Linux comes in as
winner. But FreeBSD is indeed the last. I think that (while you can argue
that his design choices may not be equally suitable for all network
applications) the issues he raises are partly valid. We have known about
them for a long time. 5.0, if it ever hits the streets:-) will hopefully
correct some of these, provided that softupdates will reach the level of
maturity that you can use them without worries on all file systems.
 
The tests (as usual for lab tests) were not necessarily based on real-life
situations (eg writing etc 10000 files in a directory) but they still give
some hints, and this is all such benchmarks are good for.

-- 
Regards:

Szilveszter ADAM
Szeged University
Szeged Hungary

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