Slashdot Mirror
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."
Can anyone explain the discontinuities in the FreeBSD plots? Intuitively I would guess that something is breaking at high load, rather than getting miraculously faster. The author suggests that a clever optimization is kicking in, but I wonder if his tests were actually ensuring that the calls succeed.
Also watch out as you read the graphs - just to keep you on your toes, he changes the colors in every one!
The winner in this case is Open Source software.
The article is very fair and very well thought out. It is almost like reading a research paper. It looks like he is inviting criticism, insight, and corrections, rather than trying to force the experiments into a pre-determined outcome.
Such a thing is not possible in the proprietary world. Any study done on proprietary software has to be tainted with opinion and the experiments must be skewed. Read the EULAs. Some EULAs won't even allow you to publish the results of such tests.
Open Source software, of the BSD kind and the GPL kind, has totally changed the way we think about and work with software. One day, we will be able to scientifically determine what software we need to suit our needs. We will know ahead of time exactly what limits and what capabilities each piece of software has. IT managers will be able to sort through real facts based on real research, rather than a bunch of shallow articles and biased reports. Software will survive on its merits alone.
The whole industry is going to benefit by this, in a large, large way. The question one day will no longer be "Microsoft or Linux?" but "Which Open Source software should we use, and why?"
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Topic of this paper is
"Scalable Network Programming
Or: The Quest For A Good Web Server (That Survives Slashdot)"
What a coincidence!
By the way, fnord web server has at least once survived one slashdotting-event. 4 seconds of googleing result in this comment which should have let to a stream of visitors.
I hope fefe will publish the numbers of visitors and the behavior of its web server as soon as possible.
Not that I wouldn't use OpenBSD, or any other operating system that met my technical needs, whatever the personality of the people involved. I've dealt with enough bad attitudes from commercial OS vendors in my years in the industry to be able to deal with it if I have to. It just seems that *BSD has an extra heaping helping of bad attitudes that make commercial vendors look like pikers.
If you *really* read that email thread, you would see the attitude loud and clear. "We don't think that it helps anything for you to tell someone he's a f**khead when he's posting a message trying to help with the OS development." "F**K YOU, *I* want control of the source and if you don't like it I'll fork my own off!"
That's my impression of it... He sounded like an immature little upset kid to me. The development of any of the O.S. OS's is a group effort, and having one person think they have all the answers and have to be the one in control is dead wrong. So, now he *has* control of his own fork of BSD, and lost the ability to maintain many of the various platform ports because he has no developers. Thus, the OpenBSD page says that for a VAX port, for instance, "support can be easily ported over from NetBSD". Why these problems are so prevalent under FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD remains something of a mystery. These systems seem to be self selective in their attraction to weirdos and big egos.
The split had nothing to do with the quality of his coding work, and everything to do with his nasty attitude towards people... and NOT just the people of NetBSD Core, but other people who were just civilians trying to help out, or looking for help.
Also watch out as you read the graphs - just to keep you on your toes, he changes the colors in every one!
The author should use a graphing technique Edward Tufte calls "small multiples". In that you lay out a series of thumbmails of the each graph series. The eye can quickly scan down the thumbmails and get a rough feeling for how each series compares.
This would avoid the problem where graphs overlay each other and with the inconsistency between graphs in the plotting conventions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In The article, The author mentions that he finds "unacceptable", or embarassing, a few things about openbsd, mainly concerning it's general speed and scalability.
ALthought not beeing an expert in bsd nor in linux, maybe i'm rong, but isn't OpenBSD made to be secure, and not the fastest operatin system ( additionally, comparing oragnges to apples, by testing release/current/stable, wasn't the best way of comparing those OSes) ????
By implementing a few feature in the OpenBSD stack and Kernell, I guess that the devellopers are delibetatelly sacrifying performance in order to get an Os less vulnerable to DOS and other vulnerabilities
It owuld be interesting to compare the same OSes in a security test to find out which OS is more secure, if speed and scalability isn't the only issue in a OS...
Felix is more than opinionated about Linux vs. BSD. Check the qmail mailing list archives for his rants with BSD users about filesystem and other performance issues. In particular, he's had a number of run-ins with those on the list who use OpenBSD--the one he labels a `stinker'.
See the url above. Those 'dead' architectures that noone's using, the very fact that they ARE maintained demonstrates someone is using them enough to keep it working. Myself, I push a 386 and a SE/30. Both are more than fast enough for my purposes.
Many people don't have the luxury of grabbing a P4 or Opteron as there whims demand. Supporting older hardware also does not slow an OS down. If done properly, it forces you to think about how to do things RIGHT so you don't eat unnecessary cpu cycles.
The interesting point is that all of these operating systems seem to be getting faster. It seems to come down to how many recent developments have been integrated into the version being tested, not any inherent differences between operating systems. This is, of course, as it should be: the source for all of these operating systems is available, and there are even frequently papers describing the techniques. If a technique is, in fact, better, it should eventually be adopted by all of them, and so your results will depend on how much has been adopted in the version you're testing.
It is encouraging to see that all of these developers are competing with the real opponent, which is not each other or even Microsoft, but the slashdot effect. After all, the goal should not be simply to be better than the others, but to be sufficient for the user's purpose, which is not hampered but rather assisted by sharing all of your tricks. It can sometimes seem like there are endless wars between Linux and BSD, but, behind the scenes, the sides actually share information. Never as much as they'd like, but always more than people think.