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Date:      25 Apr 2001 14:15:56 +0100
From:      Wayne Pascoe <wayne.pascoe@realtime.co.uk>
To:        dleimbac@earthlink.net
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Misinformation
Message-ID:  <m1snixglwz.fsf@zaphod.realtime.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <200104251242.FAA24271@hawk.mail.pas.earthlink.net>
References:  <200104251242.FAA24271@hawk.mail.pas.earthlink.net>

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Dave Leimbach <dleimbac@earthlink.net> writes:

> I have run into a few people who made the following false claims about
> freeBSD.
> These people sounded like they knew what they were talking about when I
> first spoke with them.
> 
> 1) Its based on Mach. 
> 2) The SMP in FreeBSD is far superior to even Linux 2.4.x
> 
> I am sure there were more.  This type of "I don't know what I am talking
> about but it sounds good" attitude from whoever said it was very
> convincing.  <I can't remember the person's name...>.

I'm not sure who made the second claim, but I run a server farm. We
were completely a linux shop until 2 months ago. We had been holding
out for the 2.4 Linux kernel as our supposed saviour. 2.2.x had been
plagued by VM issues for the last 9 months.

Upon loading 2.4.0 (problems also persist in 2.4.1) we found the
following: 

VM was still broken under extreme io and network load.

Software Raid 5 was trashed - when trying to rebuild an array, it
would eat your disk. This was fixed in 2.4.1

So we bit the bullet and began the move to FreeBSD. It was a fairly
heavy learning curve (new init system, new packaging system, sysctl
for tweaking, etc.), but we're getting there.

In all testing so far, FreeBSD has out performed Linux HUGELY. A Linux
box, dual PIII-500 with 512MB of ram was running a site. The load
average on the box was around 6-7. The site has been moved to a single
processor PIII-800, with 256MB ram running FreeBSD. Load is down to
3-4 at peak times.

So maybe the design is poor in some way, but the real world results
have been well worth the change for us !

Just my 2c.

-- 
- Wayne Pascoe 
E-mail: wayne.pascoe@realtime.co.uk
Phone : +44 (0) 20 7544 4668
Mobile: +44 (0) 788 431 1675

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