On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 02:20:46PM -0400, RV Tec wrote:
>
> Eric,
>
>
> > I am sure all FreeBSD users are sick and tired of saying this. USE
> > 4.10!!!!
> > Lots of people blindly follow version numbers but 5.x is a lot different
> > than 4.x in ways I don't yet feel comfortable with using on production
> > machines. Only one of those issues is with benchmark numbers, but that
> > is certainly one of them.
>
> If you don't feel comfortable with 5_branch on production, that's fine, I
> respect your choice. On the other hand, we have lots of official
> documentation saying that LinuxThreads, threading, memory handling, disk
> access is improved in 5_branch (compared to 4).
>
> I'm looking for an OS that can handle my database. OpenBSD -- which, I
> just proved by a test machine -- performs better than FreeBSD. That's why
> I can't even imagine how poorly FreeBSD 4.10 (which has just been
> released) would handle my database.
Probably much better.
FreeBSD 5.x does a lot of things really well, and it can be very
fast too, but there's no stable release of 5.x yet, and the 5.x
code is clearly hampered speedwise by the presence of loads of
debugging code. From the 5.x documentation:
---
NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT FreeBSD 5.x IS SLOW:
FreeBSD 5.x has many debugging features turned on, in
both the kernel and userland. These features attempt to detect
incorrect use of system primitives, and encourage loud failure
through extra sanity checking and fail stop semantics. They
also substantially impact system performance. If you want to
do performance measurement, benchmarking, and optimization,
you'll want to turn them off. This includes various WITNESS-
related kernel options, INVARIANTS, malloc debugging flags
in userland, and various verbose features in the kernel. Many
developers choose to disable these features on build machines
to maximize performance.
---
If Linux is really twice as fast as FreeBSD, as people have reported
recently, then go ahead and use it if that's what you want. But I
hope everyone reporting this is using optimized software, and isn't
complaining about a FreeBSD that's explicitly slowed down by running
under gobs of debugging code.
So I would imagine you'd see a huge speedbump from "downgrading" to 4.10.
Jesse Sheidlower
--
MySQL General Mailing List
For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql
To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
