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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."
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.
Who wants to start taking bets on when Theo takes the bait.
I took three computers out in my rowboat, a Windows system, a Linux system, and a BSD system, and threw them overboard to see what would happen.
The Windows system sank like a rock, the Linux system bobbed back to the surface, and the BSD system rose to the sky, to be greated by a chorus of angels.
Then I woke up, so I don't know what the angels were singing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
There's no need for such a very technical benchmark.
Regular usage of various operating systems on the same host makes it obvious.
When it comes to speed and features (or bloat), Linux is more efficient than FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. This is especially significant in SMP environments.
Linux users are always talking about the just-released experimental patches that will help their system to get 0.1% faster, or the most aggressive flags to optimize their Gentoo system.
BSD users just advocate their system with the generic word "robust".
Nowadays, stability is not really the key. Every Linux or BSD free operating system has basically the same stability. The software is the same, with the same bugs. The package system have equivalents (Debian works on NetBSD, Gentoo works a lot like BSD ports, etc) and support for common hardware is almost identical.
The reason to choose one OS over another is often more political than technical. People tend to use FreeBSD just to try "something else". People tend to use Linux because the Mandrake/RedHat/Conectiva/SuSE installers are beautiful or because Gentoo is fashion and a good way to learn what Unices are made of.
But if this is just to use common software like Apache and Qmail there's no real difference except speed. If this is what you need, Linux is definitely the best choice nowadays, especially since 2.6 kernels are almost ready for production use.
For other needs, your mileage may vary.
For instance I love OpenBSD for development. The compiler and the libc have very handy features to automatically detect bogus code. And the man pages are also excellent, with helpful hints.
For firewalls and trafic shaping, I wouldn't use anything but *BSD because of PF. PF is really the best thing in *BSD systems IMHO. The firewall is very easy to configure yet extremely powerful and fast. And I was fond of Iptables before.
For bridging and transparent firewalls, I would also use BSD because it seems to work better than Linux in this area.
In fact it's just like the girl of your dreams. Everyone's always looking for the perfect operating system that will perfectly fit all needs, but it just doesn't exist.
{{.sig}}
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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.