From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Feb 6 16:40: 0 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pericles.IPAustralia.gov.au (pericles.IPAustralia.gov.au [202.14.186.30]) by builder.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6A9E33EC7; Sun, 6 Feb 2000 16:39:52 -0800 (PST) Received: (from smap@localhost) by pericles.IPAustralia.gov.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) id LAA09251; Mon, 7 Feb 2000 11:40:28 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from anwsmh@IPAustralia.Gov.AU) Received: from disc-4-161.aipo.gov.au(10.0.4.161) by pericles.IPAustralia.gov.au via smap (V2.0) id xma009225; Mon, 7 Feb 00 11:40:20 +1100 Received: from localhost (anwsmh@localhost) by stan (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA07002; Mon, 7 Feb 2000 11:40:44 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from anwsmh@IPAustralia.Gov.AU) X-Authentication-Warning: stan: anwsmh owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 11:40:43 +1100 (EST) From: Stanley Hopcroft X-Sender: anwsmh@stan To: FreeBSD-Questions@FreeBSD.org Cc: FreeBSD-ISP@FreeBSD.org Subject: Performance of FreeBSD and MS Windows. What about select() and memory management etc ? Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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. 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, 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. 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. He claims his conclusions are based on his inspection of the Linux kernel, and I presume, what MS claim about their kernel. I probably would attach no significance to these articles because the claims are not possible for me to substantiate, but I would like to see some rebuttal from those able to do so. If there are other any public analysis of the two systems, I would like to hear about them. I don't think it reasonable that these claims of superior MS Windows performance and technology go unchallenged if in fact they are untrue. As for me, I will show more interest in the incredibly high performace and sophistication of MS Windows when the products are more usable (as servers) and available - in any thing other than a file server role. Thank you, Yours sincerely. Stanley Hopcroft Network Specialist IP Australia +61 2 6283 3189 +61 2 6281 1353 FAX To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message