Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:46:49 +0200 (CEST) From: "O. Hartmann" <ohartman@ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Some crucial questions about Linux vs. FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010191213480.11393-100000@ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de>
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Well, maybe this is not of any interests for those who "fight for FreeBSD", but it's an essential question to answer for me! I administer now for about four years a small bunch of servers which represents the backbone of our small institute and we are growing now. Because we are in need of high performance machines on a cheap basis running parallel capable Fortran compilers we will go into some discussions what to purchase and what kind of OS to use. Our focus is on Solaris x86 for educational institutions, Linux and FreeBSD. Most of the guys I talked about only know Linux and Solaris x86 because wherever we hear something about GUIs like X11 it is mentioned with Linux, if we read articles in some German magazines we get informed that Linux is a way to build up cheap and powerful internet firewalls - well, each aspect of OpenSource software is discussed with Linux being mentioned! Now you can imagine how hard it is to argue for FreeBSD and its benefits. For about one month now I take tests on Fortran compilers and how they work under FreeBSD/Linux emulation. Since March I take some tests on a dual homed firewall based on FreeBSD and the experiences I made while doing this are not very positive, especially I got most explanations how things work (what is bridging, how it works, what is IP forwarding, how it involves dual homed hosts and the IPFIREWALL facility etc.). I'm not involved with kernel development so many things seems to be secrets to me. I do not apply any kind of critical stuff here, I offer some experiences. I still use FreeBSD and my experiences are positive - regarding the system as itself. Well, to keep myself in shape and get informations about the weakness and benefits of FBSD and Linux (pointing the recent STABLE versions of both systems) I ran into a black hole. I couldn't obtain any kind of performance comparisons, especially for Fortran and numerical solutions. I never found any comparisons of network performance and firewall performance or a discussion about Linux's benefits against those FreeBSD offers. What I need is a really objective discussion about performance benefits of both systems, for instance how Linux deals with memory, how FBSD deals with memory, a comparison of both systems performing SMP jobs, how they deal with security aspects and good they will scale under heavy load. I found a very old comparison of the University of Karlsuhe, they made some tests on FBSD 2.2 and a Red Hat Linux that was recent to that time and the result was that Linux had some (up to 40%) performance losses when under heavy load while FreeBSD still performed jobs smooth. But this was in 1997, I think. Concerning our wish of using a SMP machine with Fortran compilers I had a discussion with some guys of our computer center. They all use Linux, some student's pools are built up from Linux and a new SMP cluster will be run by Linux. They all want Linux, they know Linux and they have a lot of arguements for Linux. Linux is good, I do not doubt this fact, but I have to find arguemnts for my local solution. One thing that carved into my brain was the following statement of one of the local scientists argueing for Linux: "We were told that Linux performs best with up to four CPUs in comparison to Solaris x86 (this was a statement from a SUN-employee). Solaris performs better using more than 4 CPUs". Maybe you can understand that this is some arguement that could destroy all efforts in argueing for FreeBSD as a reasonable platform ... :-(. And we all know that FreeBSD (talking about version 4.1.1) has some disadvantages in comparison to Linux while using this GIANT LOCK. So, it's hard to me to explain this problem exactly as it is in English, hope someone could understand what I mean. I have to thank those who were able to be brave and read this up to the end :-). What I need is some kind of objective comparison (best on the same platform!) of performance of Linux and FreeBSD. I need some objective performance discussions (well, please see this like this: I'm not a kind of BSD developer, I'm a consumer in that way and I need arguements to "resell" my decission using FreeBSD). If there is someone out here knowing some sites where we can look at performance tests, plese mail me! Thanks in advance, Oliver - MfG O. Hartmann ------------------------------------------------------------------- ohartman@ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de Klimadatenserver-Abteilung des IPA IT Netz- und Systembetreuung Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz Becherweg 21 D-55099 Mainz BRD/Germany Tel: +496131/3924662 FAX: +496131/3923532 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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