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Wcarchive Does 1.39tb In 24 Hours

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the fastest-if-the-fast dept.

Josef Grosch writes "Walnut Creek's FTP machine, wcarchive, running FreeBSD transfered 1.39 Terabyte in a single 24 hour period. "

7 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Perhaps a new benchmaking technique? by gwolf · · Score: 4

    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... :)

  2. Re:honest question, just curious by imp · · Score: 5

    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

  3. Re:What's the machine config? by cambyses · · Score: 4

    "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

  4. Perhaps a new benchmaking technique? by Xunker · · Score: 4

    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.
  5. honest question, just curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    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.

  6. Re:What's the machine config? by Travis+Ruthenburg · · Score: 5
    According to ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wca rchive.txt, Its configuration is as follows: Micron NetFRAME 9201 system, consisting of:
    • One 500MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU w/512K L2 cache
    • 4GB of main memory (16 * 256MB 50ns ECC EDO DIMMs)
    • 1 Adaptec AHA-2940U2W PCI single-channel wide Ultra-2 SCSI controller
    • 2 Adaptec AHA-3940AUW PCI dual-channel wide UltraSCSI controller
    • 1 Intel Pro/100+ PCI 100Mbps Fast Ethernet controller
    • 1 Bay Networks Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter

    The file contains more detailed information on the configuration. Also, there's a picture available here.

  7. I can see it now... by nicedream · · Score: 4

    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.