On Thu, Jun 24, 1999 at 01:23:19PM +0930, Mark Newton wrote: > Karl Denninger wrote: > > > I've found FreeBSD to outperform NT-anything in any task you throw at the > > machine from web service to Samba for file and print service for PCs > > running Windows. > > Granted. Perhaps we're seeing an artifact of NT's developers focussing > on optimizing their system for good benchmark performance rather than > good real-world performance. > > 'twill be interesting to see the offical report to find out where the > various strengths and weaknesses really are. > > - mark
Yes. One place where we *ARE* weak is N-way (more than 2-way) SMP systems. I'm not at all sure why this happens, but I suspect that a big part of it is concurrency issues within the kernel and filesystem. BUT - for most REAL applications that configuration is a lose. For example, for a big web server I'd prefer 4 boxes and 4 IP addresses (round-robin) than one big box with a 4-way SMP system. Why? Because I get both better performance that way AND redundancy - if one box fails, I still have three more, all of which are working. If one box fails in a 4-way SMP configuration I have nothing at all. Now there ARE monolithic applications that don't take well to that kind of scaling - big DBMS servers, for example. But DBMS servers are typically I/O bound anyway, not CPU bound (there are exceptions, yes, but the general rule is that they are RAM and disk bound). I had an NT machine that ran file and print service for my office (before I sold the company). I replaced it with SAMBA on the same hardware. Performance more than doubled, and the ONLY thing that I changed was the operating system. That's but one real-world example out of many. -- -- Karl Denninger (k...@denninger.net) Web: fathers.denninger.net I ain't even *authorized* to speak for anyone other than myself, so give up now on trying to associate my words with any particular organization. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
