Slashdot Mirror
WCArchive sets new Record
dcs
writes "The hardware upgrade for wcarchive came
not a single second too soon. In it's first full day of
operation with the new hardware, a new record was set...
969 gigabytes of traffic was generated, thanks
mainly to the recent release of RedHat 6.0. I'm
looking forward to the first terabyte in day mark, but it
seems an upgrade on network capacity is due before that
can happen. "
Don't forget that Slashdot itself runs Linux and Apache and handles about half a million hits a day, much of that dynamically generated. By my calculations, at peak times, Slashdot tops 10 hits/sec.
--Phil (Way to go, Rob!)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
It doesn't -prove- anything. It's merely an impressive feat. I have no doubt that another OS could achieve a similar accomplishment, however. Regardless, it is certainly a testament to FreeBSD's performance (not necessarily speed, also includes functionality) under extreme load.
But a 486 is hardly what people are running NT on.
The Oracle benchmarking that was posted to slashdot a couple weeks ago was also done in a biased manner.
By selecting hardware which is known to give good performance on Linux and poor performance on NT, the test is just as biased as the mindcraft study.
Which is fine, but don't pretend that they are unbiased an independent when they are not.
Oh, and BTW, all of the production servers at my company are running SMP. The intranet servers are quad processor Proliants, the Oracles are Sequents with 16 processors.
How many Linux servers do you see in production environments at Fortune 500?
Anyone who ever claims that the free Unices aren't up to handling heavy load ought to see this.
;-)
I think this proves very conclusively that the free Unices (Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc) are all very capable, stable, powerful, and robust. I'd love to see a box running a commericial OS try to match this.
Topher
It's now stable as a rock on Alpha's too :)
;-)
Is it? Neat.
I've heard lots of mixed reports on how far the Alpha port had progressed, though last I heard it was still fairly beta, but improving rapidly. The Sparc port though, last I heard, was pre-alpha still...
Topher
David Greenman, the Co-founder/Principal Architect of the FreeBSD Project just posted a new picture of the new wcarchive, it is now available here.
Updated hardware description is also available here.
It would be amazing if someone could pull some nice effects with The Gimp and make a cool looking "ftp.cdrom.com theme" for Windowmaker or something...
- Alfred Perlstein - Programmer and Administrator, Wintelcom.
I've got 4 Linux machines with dual 300 MHz PIIs and half a gig of RAM each using round robin DNS to handle a very busy web site, and it doesn't serve anywhere near 1000 gigs a day, yet it needs hardware that is much more powerfull than cdrom.com, precisely because web serving is a much harder thing than FTP serving.
You are assuming FreeBSD and Linux have identical load handling patterns - they don't. It is not inherently harder to server static HTML pages than FTP files, and if used a special light-weight HTTP server (ftp.cdrom.com use a special light weight FTP server) then I do not think it would unfeasible to serve similar amounts of HTTP data.
In order to make ftp.cdrom.com capable of transferring that much data, however, sendfile() was needed. The FreeBSD sendfile API is, if I've understood correctly, different from the Linux one, in order to be able to support HTTP. If you'd want to serve web data competitively from a Linux machine, I think you would want to implement a similar API for Linux.
You'd probably also need to do a number of mods to the Linux VM system if you want similar performance to FreeBSD; however, I can't state that conclusively, as it is a long time since I've seen any benchmarks between the two.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Is the Smart Reseller test the same that was published on ZDNet?
If so, the configs were hardly "out of the box" - the Linux box in the ZD test was heavily tuned by a member of the Samba team. Furthermore, ZD didn't publish this information, where at least Mindcraft admitted that they tuned the hell out of the NT box.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually, their whole architecture seems strange. This seems like something much better handled by multiple machines with connections to different ISPs. Oh, but they're colocated in their ISP's machine room....
I'd love to see this kind of information (bandwidth, machine, OS) and more (time-of-day loading curve, ...) for all the big data providers, whoever they are... (download.com? yahoo? aol? conxion? ...) They don't seem to brag about it much. If they have little info pages like cdrom.com's, I haven't been able to find them.
I don't know why, but this kind of stuff just grabs me. Lifestyles of the bandwidth-rich and cache-famous? Packed-Tranfer Pr0n?
As Mindcraft's web site says (paraphrasing) "you identify your goals, we do the testing to satisfy them". Given that the paying customer was identified as Microsoft, it should come as no surprise that the goal was to show NT being faster then Linux. Bear in mind though, that all _independent_ testing has shown exactly the opposite to be true, certainly for uniprocessor machines such as the ftp.cdrom.com server.
... but as those two have indicated, this is a complete farce, and you can expect the "retest" results to be as information free as the first ones.
There have yet to be any standard SMP benchmarks (TPC-D, SPECWeb96 etc) published, although an unofficial Oracle benchmark indicated Linux to beat NT there also.
Also bear in mind that the "Mindcraft" testing has since been shown to have been performed in a Microsoft lab (the "Mindcraft" e-mails originated from a Microsoft domain)...
Ultimately, all the "Mindcraft" tests really proved is that Microsoft is starting to take Linux as a _very_ serious threat to NT - not surprising given the Linux server marketshare and growth numbers.
Microsoft is attempting to recover from the PR nightmare resulting from this testing by redoing the tests with "unimpeachable" Linux configuration expertise supplied by Linus and Alan Cox
How many net servers in the real world run off SMP boxes? Most ISPs use server farms of uniprocressor machines - much better bang for the buck. No-one's denying that Linux's SMP performance could be improved, but exactly how it compares to NT (which has it's own set of problems) is really unknown to this stage due to lack of fair testing.
The Oracle test I mentioned took one approach to fairness in testing both NT and Linux out of the box with no tuning on either side.
Given how artificial benchmarks are, the real world observations of NT vs Linux performance should probably be given more weight anyway. A quad zeon box is hardly what people are running Linux servers on - many are running on 486's! Try that with NT...
You can use this site:
http://www.netcraft.com/cgi-bin/Survey/whats
to find out what server and OS are being used by a given domain name. Try egg.microsoft.com !
This works by recognising the characteristic signatures of the different OS's TCP/IP stacks as they respond to a bunch of wierd packets.