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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. "

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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.