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Date:      Thu, 15 Mar 2001 11:49:29 -0800
From:      Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group <Cy.Schubert@uumail.gov.bc.ca>
To:        David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
Cc:        Pete French <pfrench@firstcallgroup.co.uk>, mobile@FreeBSD.ORG, sos@freebsd.dk, stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Disk I/O problem in 4.3-BETA 
Message-ID:  <200103151949.f2FJnVF13620@cwsys.cwsent.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 13 Mar 2001 22:04:23 CST." <200103140404.f2E44Ne16415@grumpy.dyndns.org> 

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In message <200103140404.f2E44Ne16415@grumpy.dyndns.org>, David Kelly 
writes:
> Pete French writes:
> > All very interesting, but a small point has been forgotten
> > hasnt it ? The way I read this thread is that until recentlly
> > write-caching was enabled by default and has now been disabled (hence
> > the original obseravtion of disc performance dropping).
> > 
> > I havent noticed that FreeBSD has a bad reputation for loss of data
> > in the event of am power outage, and my own experience backs this up.
> > As so many people appear to have been running it this way by default until
> > now you might have though that if it were a serious problem in reality then
> > people would have noticed by now ?
> 
> Well, I am an ex-Linux user who got fed up with Linux trashing my disk 3
> times one week. Each time (kernel panics) the damage was bad enough fsck
> (e2fsck?) deleted a lot of critical files making a wipe/reinstall the
> fastest way back to a running system. This was shortly after the release
> of FreeBSD 2.0.0. Remember it well because that is when I became a 
> FreeBSD user. Hmm, probably 6 years ago this month.

That's the same reason I switched from Linux to FreeBSD 2.0.5 5 or 6 
years ago.

> 
Have watched Linux from "outside" since then. Noticed I was not the 
> only one losing data. From what I've seen the Linux solution was not to 
> to fix a faulty design but to hack it until it doesn't lose as much.
> 
> Linux was/is very proud of their ext2fs speed. Clearly at the expense of
> reliability. Oddly enough that machine got 600k Bytes/sec thruput on
> Linux, but 900k Bytes/sec on FreeBSD 2.0.0-RELEASE. 240 MB Western
> Digital IDE drive.
> 
> IMO the most reliable settings are the correct thing to do in spite of
> simpleminded magazine authors who will "do a shootout" of Linux vs.
> FreeBSD using only the stock settings.

This is one of the three big reasons we (at our shop) are migrating our 
infrastructure servers (kerberos, console, file, web, firewall/proxy, 
etc.) from Linux to FreeBSD.  As Linux (specifically RedHat) comes with 
more toys, bells and whistles, Linux will remain our desktop standard, 
not to mention the sure-to-be-lost political battle.


Regards,                         Phone:  (250)387-8437
Cy Schubert                        Fax:  (250)387-5766
Team Leader, Sun/Alpha Team   Internet:  Cy.Schubert@osg.gov.bc.ca
Open Systems Group, ITSD, ISTA
Province of BC




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