From owner-freebsd-advocacy  Tue Sep 12 17:20: 6 2000
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Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 17:16:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: stan@craigslist.org
To: freebsd-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org
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Subject: advocacy/21238: poor performance; missed opportunities
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>Number:         21238
>Category:       advocacy
>Synopsis:       poor performance; missed opportunities
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       critical
>Priority:       high
>Responsible:    freebsd-advocacy
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Sep 12 17:20:01 PDT 2000
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Stan Osborne
>Release:        4.0
>Organization:
Craigslist
>Environment:
no longer available
>Description:
After an outside consultant advocated we "upgrade" from Linux to FreeBSD
our sysadmin staff invested much time and effort into evaluating FreeBSD.
A new production server was built using FreeBSD 4.0 and comparted with
Linux, all on the same hardware.  The result was a comparison of the
two OSs on the same hardware running the exact same application tests.
This type of testing is as fair as it gets.

The reasons for staying with Linux follow.

o) Linux (2.2.16 kernel) benchmarked far better in terms of our search
   code (3x faster on the same box), and slightly better for Apache
   performance.

o) The final straw was that the GDBM libraries for FreeBSD were very
   slow.

If performance of these two important tests was close to the same,
we would have switched to FreeBSD.   Instead, for now the idea
of switching to FreeBSD has been dropped and not likley to be
re-examined anytime soon.

Until fairly unsophisticated applications perform as well on
FreeBSD, these rare opportunities to convert a predominately
Linux shop to FreeBSD are a waste of time.
>How-To-Repeat:
Properly benchmark GDBM and Apache based applications
using the same hardware.   Compare results between FreeBSD
and Linux.
>Fix:
Regretably the fix is to use Linux.

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:


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