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Wcarchive Does 1.39tb In 24 Hours
Josef Grosch writes
"Walnut Creek's FTP machine, wcarchive, running FreeBSD
transfered 1.39 Terabyte in a single 24 hour period. "
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Would be too hard to make it real - What would happen if tomorrow morning you read in Slashdot about such a benchmark? I can assure you that thousands of people would be requesting more and more info from the free server, and hundreds would be sending DoS attacks to the NT one... :)
The biggest easily identifiable things that make FreeBSD be able to handle this load are the CAM subsystem (to serve up the data fast), which Linux currently lacks. Justin Gibbs did an excellent job of getting close to the max performance out of SCSI with CAM. Linux's SCSI subsystem is primitive and slow in comparison. It lacks good error recovery and mixes too many levels of abstraction. While it does work for most people most of the time, I would doubt if it could drive the I/O subsystem as fast as FreeBSD does.
I'm biased. I work with Justin here at Pluto, and we have Video server machines based on FreeBSD that are disk bandwidth limited. It is very fast and I'm very impressed with it.
Warner Losh
Does anyone here know how to switch this controller to 80M/s on Linux - I can only get it to work at 40M/s on Linux 2.2.8. Not that this speed is critical - I'm not having much luck finding hard drives that'll do 80M/s, I'm just curious.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Thanks.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
"Welcome to wcarchive - home FTP site for Walnut Creek CDROM. There are currently 4963 users out of 6000 possible. This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5. The operating system is FreeBSD. 100Mbps colocation services provided by CRL Network Service." (from ftp://ftp.cdrom.com )
Up until just recently the box was a lowly 200pro as far as i know and was still setting records.
Daniel Harvey
It was NEVER a lowly 200pro. It was a 200pro with a lot of RAM. Serving up 13 MB/second sustained on a system with modern SCSI hardware (disks and host adaptors), a large file system cache, and modern network cards (that do bus mastering DMA) is not a CPU bound task.
After all the flap about Linux-vs-NT, how about a *real* realworld benchmark -- Have the OS in question pull a 24 hour shift as the WCArchive server-- Whomever puches packets faster and crashes less, wins!
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Let's see...it's the official server for FreeBSD and Slackware Linux, as well as being a mirror for NetBSD, Red Hat, TurboLinux, Debian and Suse (check in the Sunsite dir for Suse). They also have a lot of ID Software stuff (don't know if they're an official mirror, but it looks like it). They seem to have a lot of other things, but I haven't really explored the UNIX or Windows stuff yet.
OS design is a matter of comprimise, especially with general-purpose operating systems. Linux and the BSDs have to accomodate people using machines as web servers, or as HTTP clients, or as single -user machines, or all of these at once and more. This necessitates comprimises between such things as portability, and speed, and generality, and code-ability of features, and so on.
/. Mincraft threads.) Or are Unix derivatives so versatile with kernel tuning parameters and such that a single-purpose OS (ServerBSD, perhaps, or "Servix" :) would be unnecessary?
My question is, why not take one of these general-purpose OSes and, for some given task, hard-code in optimizations? This new OS could still remain backwards-compatible with the old OS, so it wouldn't really be a fork.
The sort of optimization I'm thinking of here would be along the lines of giving some daemon a hard-coded place in memory, or some similarly evil thing. (I recall hearing that NT did something along these lines; a discussion of it came up on one of the
With Linux getting such media attention, it's normal that some people in the community don't get the message or the point or whatever... It's like everything else, kids come, get bored and go away...
I'm definitely impressed with *BSD, and may well give it (them?) a go when I have a PC for it.
Anyway, the point is, we don't fight each other mind you, we just fight world domination by ONE and unique operating system... I want choice! I want the best system for the task, whichever it is... And if FreeBSD is that much better than other systems for File/Web/FTP servers, well, I'll just have to try it by myself!
Repeat after me, we're not fighting each other, we must keep an open mind and as they say over here, what have I contributed to the community today?
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
Actually, the connection can't keep up with the disks. This recent record (of over a tb) was due to the recent upgrade to gigabit ethernet. With the previous 100Mb ethernet, a tb was a mere dream.
Same goes for the first letter: T is the real symbol for Tera(=10^12), while M is for Mega(=10^6) and m is for milli(=10^-3), D is for deka(=10^1) and d is for deci(=10^-1). t has no special meaning, so it may also be understood if used for Tera although I would not recommend using it this way.
My PC has 32 MB of RAM, while my modem transfers data at a speed of 33 kb/sec - You see de difference.
ms
PS: I'm missing SUP and SUB for super/subskripts - Rob, pls add them
Why? Because the point of the Mindcraft survey was to denigrate free UNIX, of any stripe. Whether it's FreeBSD or Linux it sheds doubt on their veracity either way.
I agree, FreeBSD and Linux RULES!!! I'm glad to see that it is hitting the spotlight a lot more ofter. Now if we could just be a little nicer to each other......
Well, I have no comment as to how well Linux could do in comparison to FreeBSD, but will this machine even be the same on Linux. ie. Can linux even access 4GB of RAM on x86 hardware? Last I heard it was about 2GB.
Realistially, what would happen if you substituted say... Linux or (god help us all) NT for FreeBSD on that machine. Seriously, would it suddenly grind to a halt? What exactly is special about FreeBSD that makes it and it alone able to dole out data at that rate? To me (and I am not an expert by any means) it sounds like most of the ability of this site is dictated by the amazing disk I/O subsystem. This is an honest question, not a flame or criticism of anything. I am just curious.
I think it works this way:
with 40 MHz bus/16bit wide:
single ended : 40M
Low Voltage Differential: 80M
You need to have all your drives and terminators LVD enabled(and no SE devices connected to the same chanel) to run in Ultra2 mode.
The file contains more detailed information on the configuration. Also, there's a picture available here.
Pretty soon all those people that complain, "Rob, a new Linux kernel comes out EVERY week! Is it really Slashdot news-worthy?" will be saying "Rob, cdrom.com sets a new transfer record every week! Is it really Slashdot news-worthy?"
And I love every minute of it.
120 GB for the FreeBSD tree...
13 GB for Seti@Home...
1.5 GB for cheats (seems low for a scr1pt-k1dd13 area)
1 GB for XFree86 (heh)
and at the bottom...
/UPLOADS.TXT 2k.
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