Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 11:42:38 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Stanley Hopcroft <Stanley.Hopcroft@IPAustralia.Gov.AU> Cc: FreeBSD-Questions@FreeBSD.ORG, FreeBSD-ISP@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Performance of FreeBSD and MS Windows. What about select() and memory management etc ? Message-ID: <20000207114238.G22697@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0002071050190.6891-100000@stan> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0002071050190.6891-100000@stan>
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On Monday, 7 February 2000 at 11:40:43 +1100, Stanley Hopcroft wrote: > Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, > > I am writing to ask about the relative performance of FreeBSD and MS > Windows 95 and NT as desktop and server. > > This letter is inspired by my own experience of FreeBSD 3.4-RELEASE and > Win 95 OSR2 as a desktop on the same hardware (P5 166MHz, slow IDE, 32 > MB RAM) and ariticles about Intel Unix (Linux) in magazines. > > My experience with FreeBSD 3.4-RELEASE (kde 1.1.2, Communicator 4.7, > Metaframe, pine etc) as a desktop is that it seems to thrash more > than OSR2. I think this is because Netscape wants to have 20 or MB of > memory. This is certainly the only case I have heard of where somebody has found FreeBSD's performance lacking in comparison with Microsoft. > In "Windows NT magazine" (May 1999), an article "Linux and the > Enterprise: is this OS ready for prime time" by Mark Russinovich, > compares the network performance of NT and Linux (or other Posix 1 > compliant OS) unfavourably on the basis that select() does not > scale, It's true that select() doesn't scale well, but I haven't seen any evidence that Microsoft's performance can reach the levels where it starts to become critical under UNIX. I'm certain that it has nothing to do with the problems you're experiencing. > or perform as well as the non-standard system call that MS provides > and the author claims is implemented on other high performance Unix > platforms. There's certainly no one system call which replaces select(). The ones I have seen appear to have nothing to do with Microsoft. > The same author in another article claims that the VM system of Unix > also fails to provide the facilities or performance of the MS > system. That's correct. What I've heard of is that the Microsoft NT VM system is very primitive, and that it gets thoroughly confused with higher loads. It's not impossible that it has been completely rewritten for "Windows 2000", however. > He claims his conclusions are based on his inspection of the Linux > kernel, and I presume, what MS claim about their kernel. The Linux VM system isn't the world's best, nor the best thing about Linux. But he would have to come up with some very strong arguments to make me even take his argumentation seriously. Getting back to your own experience: by default, FreeBSD doesn't do DMA on IDE drives. It's possible that the perceived performance would be much better with DMA. In addition, kde is a known memory hog. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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