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Benchmarking the Scalability of BSD and Linux
Fefe writes "I recently did some benchmarks for a talk about scalable network programming I held at Linux Kongress 2003. The benchmark results turned out to be surprising enough to present them on their own. This ought to end those pesky flame wars about whose IP stack or memory management scales better. Or maybe not."
I have a complete copy (graphs and all) here.
I'm not so sure its dying, but forked it certainly is. Go checkout whats going on in the "dragonflyBSD" camp. Most of the posts have been by Prof Matt Dillon, an experienced coder who came up thru the amiga ranks, writing the popular DICE C compiler for it many years ago.
What he has to say so far tells me that his version of BSD will both scale very well AND work great in the SMP dept. The process locks that slow down linux in SMP versions and prevent its doing x amount of work for each processor added are being done away with by Matt by subbing a job isolation scheme that assures each job runs on its own cpu rather than handing each call off to a freshly assigned one.
He seems to think it will scale a lot better with far fewer halts for cache flushing and reloads. What I've read so far would seem to make sense. He claims its already more stable and faster than FreeBSD in any version 4.8, which he used for the fork base. First release target is next year.
No, I don't think BSD is dying, just doing an end run to a higher place in the performance pack a year from now.
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Cheers, Gene
So this guy grabs a beta version of a new tree in freebsd, and runs it against stable netbsd, openbsd and linux? Eh? Did he even compile his own kernel and take out all the debugging information in the released kernel? Did he turn off the debug info in the kernel config, on by default? I kinda doubt it somehow... If he knew enough to do that, he'd know that 5.1 has NOT been tagged stable.
Most freebsd users will look at this study and laugh. But people who don't know anything about freebsd (perhaps that includes the author?) might get the wrong idea. The study needs to be redone using the -stable tree, not the debug-riddled 5.1-RELEASE.
Not sabotage, security. In case you don't know: itojun is the guy between all the BSD's IPv6 support, and has been very active in the standarisation process.
Can anyone explain the discontinuities in the FreeBSD plots?
Well, the drop-offs of FreeBSD in a couple of the graphs can be explained by him not reading the docs.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I think 5.1-CURRENT is absolutely a fair comparison with Linux 2.6-test7. Both are the almost finished code for the next stable release.
Maybe you wouldn't run either of them right now, but a few months down the line, these will be what everyone is using.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
I knew when I read the post that this would lead to another FreeBSD v. Linux flamewar, despite the author's claims of 'hoping' to end those.
I don't think using 5.1-CURRENT is a problem, but the way the benchmark results were layed out was begging for a flamewar. As I explained earlier the results are not as bad as either linux fanatics, or FreeBSD fanatics would have it. It would have been simple to avoid such flamewar (or am I too optimistic?) by doing two things:
Explain the status of both (linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 5.1) development branches - as I have outlined in my earlier post. If you take into consideration what I have written above, than you would have realized that results for FreeBSD are not that bad, in fact, they are excellent.
Include results for 4.8 - or 4.9 rc3 (but I would be happier with just the production release) in the test, just as 2.4 was included on the linux side.
To sum up: I believe that these benchmarks confirms what I thought for a long time: FBSD 5.1 development is on par with Linux 2.6. Perhaps this was the reason for his last "Or may be not" remark.