Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2000 20:37:23 -0800 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> Cc: cuk@cuk.nu, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Stability Message-ID: <200011050437.UAA23039@implode.root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 04 Nov 2000 21:23:45 EST." <200011050223.eA52Nj0490171@saturn.cs.uml.edu>
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>Marko Cuk writes: > >> Can anyone explain me, why is FreeBSD known as powerful sistem >> with industrial strenghth and rock stability, but I manage to >> crash it several times. > >The "known as" part is simple: focused marketing > >OK, maybe not that simple. People leave an OS that is unstable >for _them_ in favor of another. Even if that other OS is often >less stable, it will most likely work. What are the chances of >having both OSes be unstable, hmmm? So the new OS looks good. >Less popular OSes tend to benefit from this affect, because >most of their users jumped ship from somewhere else. The new >OS couldn't possibly be worse than the one that was left. > >As FreeBSD gets more popular, it will have more users that are >not desperate to replace an existing unstable OS. Some portion >of these users will find FreeBSD to be unstable. Maybe they will >switch to OpenBSD, Debian, or Solaris -- which will then be >reported as being more stable. (for RZ1000 owners: Debian) > >So, feel free to pick a new OS and tell everyone it is stable. Actually it's less simple than that. All OSes have areas of instability. The trick in making a reputation of stability is to make the system stable in the areas that most people use. For FreeBSD, that would be non-exotic networking applications (Web, FTP, and IP routing), and basic file server and database applications. Anytime you get into the fringe, like network bridging or software RAID, then you're using code that doesn't get as much testing and is thus more prone to bugs. We've also made a major effort to make FreeBSD scalable - much more scalable than any of the alternative OSes. It's rare that a properly tuned FreeBSD server will fall over under high loads and it tends to perform better under those loads than anything else available. -DG David Greenman Co-founder, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org President, TeraSolutions, Inc. - http://www.terasolutions.com Pave the road of life with opportunities. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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