Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Benchmarking the Scalability of BSD and Linux

Posted by michael on from the pedal-to-the-metal dept.

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."

4 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. Security by dmiller · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:FreeBSD may be dying but it's fast! by __aafkqj3628 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:What IPv6 "sabotage" did OpenBSD do? by __past__ · · Score: 4, Informative
    Oh and the read-only sysctl problem for FreeBSD that he mentions was probably due to securelevel's being on (meaning you can't modify kernel variables).
    Nope, kern.maxproc is really read-only in a running system even in securelevel -1. You have to set it in /boot/loader.conf (which doesn't seem to be prominently documented anywhere, so not finding it is nothing to blame fefe for).
    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  4. Re:Why the hell fbsd 5.1? by molnarcs · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.