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Date:      Mon, 9 Jun 2014 08:19:58 -0400
From:      Paul Mather <paul@gromit.dlib.vt.edu>
To:        George Mitchell <george+freebsd@m5p.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Stable Mailing List <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, Andreas Nilsson <andrnils@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: Not to beat a dead horse, but ...
Message-ID:  <B63A1D8C-5564-40FD-BB1C-DCBC078A16F7@gromit.dlib.vt.edu>
In-Reply-To: <5394F72E.4080306@m5p.com>
References:  <5394A848.7030609@m5p.com> <CAPS9%2BSuR=F2jCsp=%2BHvU3kaZvTtULZ5D%2BkX-1PZdmHd1RP1RSw@mail.gmail.com> <5394B80A.2030901@m5p.com> <20140608232203.GN31367@funkthat.com> <5394F72E.4080306@m5p.com>

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On Jun 8, 2014, at 7:52 PM, George Mitchell <george+freebsd@m5p.com> wrote:

> On 06/08/14 19:22, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
>> [...]  it turns out that the electricity
>> savings in a year, paid for the entire cost of the new switch...  We
>> were talking ~$250/year in savings, so, upgrading can end up saving
>> you money...
>> 
> Thanks for the advice on what hardware I should run.  But why should I
> believe that upgrading to SMP and running with ULE will make my life
> better?  In fact, when I tried ULE + a six-core system + dnetc + make
> buildworld, etc., a couple of years ago (I do have one SMP system),
> the results were just as appalling compared to 4BSD as with a single
> processor.                                                -- George


One reason to believe that things might be better could be that a lot 
of development can happen in "a couple of years."  It's my belief, in 
fact, that a focus of FreeBSD development in recent years has been in 
improving performance on multi-core systems.

I recently replaced my single-core FreeBSD/i386 system with a six-core 
FreeBSD/amd64 system and my buildworld+buildkernel times went down from 
over 5 hours to under 40 minutes.  The only single-core systems I run 
any more are on FreeBSD/arm.  As others have pointed out, it gets 
harder and harder to buy new mainstream single-core systems, so it's 
inevitable that there will be less contemporary development focus there.

Cheers,

Paul.






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