NetBSD Focuses On Scalability

An anonymous reader writes "Felix von Leitner recently performed some benchmarks (previous story) for a talk about scalable network programming he held at Linux Kongress 2003. The winners in this scalability lineup were Linux and FreeBSD 5, followed by NetBSD and finally OpenBSD. What's interesting is that in only two weeks time the NetBSD team made dramatic improvements. Felix performed his benchmarks again and the results are nothing short of astonishing. NetBSD now has better scalability than FreeBSD." Read on for a list of improvements.

the submitter lists these changes:

• socket: previously O(n), now O(1).
  
• bind: greatly improved, but still O(n). Much less steep, though.
  
• fork: a modest O(n) for dynamically linked programs, O(1) for statically linked.
  
• mmap: a bad O(n) before, now O(1) with a small O(n) shadow.
  
• touch after mmap: a bad strange graph in 1.6.1, a modest O(n) a week ago, now O(1).
  
• http request latency: previously O(n), now O(1)

This is a very good job from the NetBSD team! I hope to see more benchmarks and more improvement for a great OS like NetBSD."

Comments

Open Source, +1 RedHat

[Gothmolly]

Or the NetBSD guys looked at all of Ingo Molnar's kernel hacks and incorporated the same logic. 2 weeks to implement all these things is an awfully short period of time, IF YOU ARE DOING THE HEAVY LIFTING OF THE DESIGN. Implementing someone else's algorithm is much easier.