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Date:      Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:17:20 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Sascha Schumann <sas@schell.de>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Real performance comparisons (was: FreeBSD 3.1 SMP outperforms SuSE 6.0 SMP by factor 2.3 !!!)
Message-ID:  <19990317111720.O429@lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <19990316150715.A3316@schell.de>; from Sascha Schumann on Tue, Mar 16, 1999 at 03:07:15PM %2B0100
References:  <19990316150715.A3316@schell.de>

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On Tuesday, 16 March 1999 at 15:07:15 +0100, Sascha Schumann wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 1999 at 05:13:20PM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
>> I tend to agree.  I could accept the statement "Linux SMP gives less
>> performance than FreeBSD SMP".  I can`t accept the statement "Linux
>> SMP gives no performance improvement".
>
> Well, I could accept it, if it would be technically correct. But Mr Klemm's
> claims are simply invalid. I probably do not need to reiterate on that fact.
>
> Alternatively, I will claim that Linux is 1200% faster, since I can calculate
> DES keys at a rate of 10M/sec on my Linux box (Alpha PC164UX, 633MHz) and only
> 0.8M/sec on my FreeBSD box (Intel Pentium, 166MHz) (yes, it is non sense).
>
>> The first thing that came into
>> my mind was "he must have made a mistake".  Other possibilities are
>> that make -j doesn`t work right on Linux, or that Linux SMP doesn`t
>> even the load as well as FreeBSD does (for example, some MP systems
>> put all children in the same CPU).
>
> Linux distributes the load across the various CPUs. If you want to
> know which system scales better for your needs, test it directly
> with your application.

I believe this is exactly what Andreas did.  For various reasons, it
didn't work.

> Do not rely on someone who does not even tell you how he produced
> his results.

Andreas was quite specific about his results.  The only mistake he
made (and one about which I commented) was that he initially accepted
the fact that he got *no* performance improvement from the SMP
implementation.  This is at least a documentation problem of the SuSE
distribution.

As somebody else said, it *would* be interesting to compare Linux and
FreeBSD performance objectively and in detail.  The only comparison of
this nature that we have at the moment is from the Gartner group
(http://advisor.gartner.com/n_inbox/hotcontent/hc_2121999_3.html#h8),
which shows that FreeBSD outperforms Linux by in the order of 40% in
certain server applications.  While I don't doubt the validity of this
information, it would be interesting to research where the differences
lie, and the extent to which such measurements are typical.

Greg
--
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