bonnie - measures transfer-rate of block- and char-wise sequential in- and output on file 2 x main memory
for nfs: run on a nfs mounted directory
other things possible but are not done: bonnie++, large amounts of metadata operations, performance on large directories, tests of various filesystems (reiserfs, gfs, xfs, jfs, lfs)
Plan 9's 8.5 aims at simplifying how text is used with computers. 8.5 makes Emacs unnecessary
Some of my favorite features in Plan 9 are you can enter multi-lined text using the Escape key, instead of sendmail's ^D or dot-on-a-single-line kluge. 8.5 is based around text, text can be selected with the mouse and copied into a/dev/snarf buffer.
If 8.5 takes off, it will definitely be a success.
Computers download information, he says. They do not teach children to think.
"The Internet," Roszak recently told The Dallas Morning News, "offers electronic graffiti. The idea that they should be swimming in a sea of information is idiotic. The essence of thinking is mastering ideas."
says that the instant gratification involved in downloading information off the Internet -
The article was about how the Internet prevents learning. I agree with this as it's a haven for electronic graffiti. Obviously, computers are much more than the Internet. Computers can be used to make students think by teaching them programming.
If I understand your question, switching between portrait and landscape mode should be easy.
I would use XF86Config to define two resolutions: one for landscape, one for portrait. The dimensions you use should be porportionally opposite from each other
Edit your/usr/X11R6/etc/keys.conf file to contain a line to define F12 to change the resolution. I'm not sure how you could go about this as I don't use X, but it should be easy.
Alternatively, use Meta-Control-plus and Meta-Control-minus to change the resolution on the fly. In your XF86Config file, define only two resolutions, and M-C-+ or M-C-- will swap you between the two. Hope this helps.
Shockwave Rider: A cyberpunk story from the days before "cyberpunk" was a concept was written by John Brunner. The book goes for about $5.99 or $7.00 in Canada, with an ISBN of 0345324315. Scifi.com has a review of this book you may find interesting.
Nickie Haflinger has a unique talent: He's a phone phreak, someone who can manipulate the global data network using an ordinary veephone. And in a world where everything but the odd "paid-avoidance zone" is tied to the net, he's a dangerous man. More than one man, actually, since his ability -- combined with a pilfered high-level government code -- allows him to change identities at will.
A good deal of the time Science Fiction only gets part of the future right. John Brunner, at least in terms of the setting of the future, is very correct. His book foresaw the internet when most science fiction writers were still imagining big supercomputers acting as separate entities, programmed by tons of punch cards. However the pessimistic view he takes of the effect of this new future I find unbelievable. But then again, what do I know, this essay might have well caused someone to experience information overload:-)
To answer your question about tapeworms, in 1980 researchers at Xerox PARC dubbed the first self-replicating, self-propagating computer program a "worm", after the "tapeworms" Nickie used to erase his previous identities.
Slashdot Mirror
Thomas Graichen
thomas.graichen@innominate.de
innominate AG
http://innominate.de
http://innominate.org/~tgr/projects/tuning
Overview
- Disclaimer
- Why?
- Which Systems?
- What To Test?
- Details
- Results
- Conclusions
- Other Issues
- Tuning
- Future
- Thanks
- Contact
Disclaimer- no OS religious wars please!
- keep it simple - nobody is perfect
- there will be no "winner"
- more complex than expected
- moving targets - everything may be different tomarrow
- depends on hardware, drivers etc.
- ment [sic] as a relative comparison
Why?- curiosity
- linux is more often used in the "classic" server area - how does it perform?
- in the shadow of linux some other free OS are more often used, too - how about their performance
- often comparisons are quite biased
- finding ways to tune a given system for more performance
Which Systems?- all currently available free OS which are usable for production: linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Hurd
- Hurd did not seem to be suitable after some initial tests (1GB filesystem limit, nfs bugs, no posgresql)
- to get a feeling of how all this compares to "commercial" systems we also tested solaris/x86 (7&8)
What To Test?- filesystem performance
- nfs performance
- webserver performance
- database performance
- scalability (parallel compiling)
- most tests done also in parallel
- a lot more possible
Details- all tests were done on exactly the same hardware (K6/400, VIA, 64MB, 6GB IDE, 100MBit 3com)
- same hardware was used for client and server c/s tests
- disks were partitioned exactly the same way on all systems
- data partitions were freshly formatted
- all the services are configured as identical as possible on all systems
Details (cont.)- all tests were done on dedicated otherwise unloaded systems
- client server tests were done on a 100MBit back to back connection
- systems were carefully set up
- tests were run multiple times to make sure that they give reproduceable results
- client/server tests were run with two client systems: linux 2.2 & FreeBSD 4
Details - Systems- recent versions of all systems
- linux: 2.4.0-test1-acxx - very fresh kernel due to the big problems in the vm and buffer management in the late 2.3.xx kernels, also linux 2.2 was
- *BSD: checkout of the -CURRENT trees from spring this year (2000)
- solaris: version 7 and 8 for x86
- Hurd: not tested
Details - Filesystems/NFS- interest: filesystem throughput
- bonnie - measures transfer-rate of block- and char-wise sequential in- and output on file 2 x main memory
- for nfs: run on a nfs mounted directory
- other things possible but are not done: bonnie++, large amounts of metadata operations, performance on large directories, tests of various filesystems (reiserfs, gfs, xfs, jfs, lfs)
Details - Webserver- interest: http access performance
- http_load - can create well customizable load of random http accesses for a given url list
- 3 times parallel: 32 big file fetches (1MB), 1024 cgi fetches (hello), 4096 page fetches (1KB)
- multiple threads and instances in parallel (2, 16, 64)
Details - Database- interest: performance of sql queries
- postgresql as database target
- a few random value tables of various types loaded into it
- little mix of sql statements ran against it (selects, inserts, updates, joins, deletes,
...)
Details - Scalability- interest: scheduling, virtual memory management
- compilation of MesaLib-3.0
- increasing number of parallel compiles
- all with a little relative time to avoid all doing the same at the same time
- why Mesa ? - compiles on all platforms tested, no configure, big enough
Results- even these simple tests show: there are differences of performance between the systems for various tasks
- NetBSD and OpenBSD are quite close to each other (history)
- at least some of the free systems are in most of the tests better than the "commercial" UNIX solaris
- linux 2.2 has some serious problems under higher loads
Conclusions (cont.)- linux 2.4 will most probably bring linux in nearly all tests cases to the top level
- in some cases it is really advisable also to consider the others (esp. FreeBSD for high load, NFS and IO)
- performance is not all (OpenBSD - security, NetBSD - clean design, portability, solaris - applications)
- trying to compare as many systems is more complex than you expect
:-)
Other Issues- SMP scalability (locking problems)
- linux: 2.2 is ok, 2.4 is good
- FreeBSD: 4.0 is ok, SMP project
- NetBSD, OpenBSD: in progress
- solaris: good
- filesystem scheduling: linux 2.2 has problems with parallel bonnie - 2.4 better
- lots of filesystems to choose from: reiserfs, xfs, gfs, jfs, lfs
Other Issues (cont.)- mbuf problem: for all *BSD systems the NMBCLUSTERS parameter has to be raised for any serious use
- with full http_load the *BSD systems tend to produce errors - careful tuning required
- linux nfs implementation has serious problems (async, stale file handles, etc.)
Tuning- linux:
- /proc/sys/...
- hdparm (-d, -Xxx,
...) - kernel config
- FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD:
- sysctl kern, vm.
- kernel config
- solaris
- /etc/system, ndd
http://www.innominate- filesystem:
- which one
- blocksize, async, soft updates
- nfs:
- rsize, wsize, async, v3, tcp
- others:
- optimized recompilation
- optimized applications (apache)
- duplex network settings
Future- moving target: is only valid for today
- should be continued (time
... :-)
Thanks- I would like to thank all people at innominate who helped me with all this
... especially Jens Sanders and Michael Krax and innominate itself.
ContactThomas Graichen
thomas.graichen@innominate.de
innominate AG
http://innominate.de
slides:
http://innominate.de/~tgr/projects/tuning
Plan 9's 8.5 aims at simplifying how text is used with computers. 8.5 makes Emacs unnecessary
Some of my favorite features in Plan 9 are you can enter multi-lined text using the Escape key, instead of sendmail's ^D or dot-on-a-single-line kluge. 8.5 is based around text, text can be selected with the mouse and copied into a /dev/snarf buffer.
If 8.5 takes off, it will definitely be a success.
The article was about how the Internet prevents learning. I agree with this as it's a haven for electronic graffiti. Obviously, computers are much more than the Internet. Computers can be used to make students think by teaching them programming.
If I understand your question, switching between portrait and landscape mode should be easy.
I would use XF86Config to define two resolutions: one for landscape, one for portrait. The dimensions you use should be porportionally opposite from each other
Edit your /usr/X11R6/etc/keys.conf file to contain a line to define F12 to change the resolution. I'm not sure how you could go about this as I don't use X, but it should be easy.
Alternatively, use Meta-Control-plus and Meta-Control-minus to change the resolution on the fly. In your XF86Config file, define only two resolutions, and M-C-+ or M-C-- will swap you between the two. Hope this helps.
To answer your question about tapeworms, in 1980 researchers at Xerox PARC dubbed the first self-replicating, self-propagating computer program a "worm", after the "tapeworms" Nickie used to erase his previous identities.
Hope this helps.