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Date:      Mon, 5 Oct 1998 13:53:35 -0700
From:      perry@zso.dec.com (Reginald Perry)
To:        <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: PC Magazine 10/20/1998 Article about FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <69CAF7F9AF57D2118D9A0000F881B4DD02F300@zsoexc1.zso.dec.com>
In-Reply-To: <69CAF7F9AF57D2118D9A0000F881B4DD06BB3A@zsoexc1.zso.dec.com>

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They didn't say. This is the relevant paragraph:

"We tested FreeBSD in one of its most common applications: Web serving. We
set up two Dell PowerEdge 2200 servers with 128MB RAM and a single Pentium
II CPU, installing FreeBSD with Apache 1.3.0 on one and Windows NT 4.0 with
IIS 4.0 on the other. On our ZD WebBench 2.0 tests, performance leveled off
quickly; memory was the bottleneck for both NOSs. FreeBSD outperformed
Windows NT by a sizable margin, however, as you increase RAM, Windows NT
surpasses FreeBSD because of a cache limitation in Apache and FreeBSD."

At the bottom of the page, is a WebBench graph of clients on the X axis and
requests/second on the Y axis that shows both leveling off at about 8
clients with NT starting to level off above 4 clients and FreeBSD leveling
off very sharply at 8 clients. The level is at ~200 requests/second for NT
and ~600 requests/second for FreeBSD, if I am extrapolating this graph
correctly. The graph measures out to 60 clients. Of course they failed to
show a graph for average maximum requests/second vs. amount of RAM.


-Reggie

-----Original Message-----
From: Eivind Eklund [mailto:eivind@yes.no]
Sent: Monday, October 05, 1998 1:27 PM
To: Reginald Perry; freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: PC Magazine 10/20/1998 Article about FreeBSD


On Mon, Oct 05, 1998 at 12:12:50PM -0700, Reginald Perry wrote:
> Hi there,
> 	There is an article in the Net Tools, From The Bench section of PC
Magazine
> talking about FreeBSD 2.2.7. Looks pretty factual, but there was one
> confusing statement. They initially configured both machines with 128MB of
> RAM. They then increased the RAM and noted that as you do this NT
surpasses
> FreeBSD in their performance measure. They state that this is because of a
> cache limitation in Apache and FreeBSD. Is this true? Could someone
describe
> this in more detail if so?

FreeBSD is tuned to have max performance when it get under load - ie,
when it actually is doing something.  There should not be any
limitations to the use of cache - FreeBSD basically regard
_everything_ as cache.  Your entire RAM is just a cache for the disk.

I'd guess the benchmark interpretation comes from the reviewer doing a
wild guess on why FreeBSD was slower.

BTW: How much was the difference?  And how much did they increase the
RAM size?

Eivind.


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