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Date:      Wed, 03 Sep 1997 19:31:45 -0500
From:      dkelly@hiwaay.net
To:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: (none) 
Message-ID:  <199709040031.TAA07828@nospam.hiwaay.net>
In-Reply-To: Message from Sean Eric Fagan <sef@Kithrup.COM>  of "Wed, 03 Sep 1997 16:40:09 PDT." <199709032340.QAA10588@kithrup.com> 

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Sean Eric Fagan writes:
>
> An interesting article.  FreeBSD does not come out as well as I would have
> liked, though -- better than NT, but not as good as BSD/OS or Linux.  (They
> don't give any numbers for SCO.)
> 
> The numbers they do give for Linux are surprising, in fact -- it would seem
> to indicate that Linux is considerably ahead of FreeBSD 2.2.2 in terms of
> performance as a Web server, even with several hundred "simultaneous"
> connections.

The article says:

	For example, Linux has a long but fairly
	straightforward configuration file for adding device
	support to the kernel, but no tools to optimize kernel
	performance and very little documentation on how
	to do so by hand. SCO has about a dozen tools and
	volumes of documentation for literally every single
	kernel parameter, which makes up for the lack of
	source with which to hack out yet another Unix
	variation. FreeBSD has a single basic configuration
	file with C define statements; the file is used to parse
	the kernel source into a source tree for compilation
	using the Unix program called "make." No fancy
	configuration utilities, no neat toys.

You mean config(8) isn't a fancy configuration utility? It sure isn't make.

"... basic configuration file with C define statements..." ?
Is he talking about /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/{GENERIC,LINT} ?

nospam: {704} cp /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC /tmp
nospam: {705} cd /tmp
nospam: {706} mv GENERIC GENERIC.c
nospam: {707} cc GENERIC.c
GENERIC.c:8: invalid preprocessing directive name
GENERIC.c:60: unterminated character constant
GENERIC.c:81: unterminated character constant
GENERIC.c:104: unterminated character constant
GENERIC.c:157: unterminated character constant
nospam: {708}

GENERIC didn't look like C to me either.  :-)

Under the "How We Tested" link:

	We tested operating systems as shipped, and
	adjusted performance variables and kernel
	parameters only when the operating system
	produced an error condition, such as running out of
	processes or not having enough memory available
	to handle the load.

Meaning items like "maxusers" was not adjusted? Says their test
system had 128 MB of RAM, does FreeBSD report an error in this case?
Did they do what was needed so FreeBSD could use all 128M?

I went looking for performance charts and missed them if they exist.
With Linux running an asynchronous filesystem to get an equal test
one would have to add the async option on FreeBSD's mount.

Was playing with async this weekend and dropped "make world" times
from 2:47 to 2:15 on my new PPro 166/512k.

"make depend kernel install" only saved 30 seconds with async, down
to 4 minutes 15 seconds.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.





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