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."

2 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. FreeBSD may be dying but it's fast! by seanadams.com · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  2. Open Source Software clearly superior by jgardn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.