I find it amazing that someone would set out to test for VM performance, and run the tests that he ran. Sendmail? Tweaked and (even more than usual) unreliable Sendmail? Someone is going to choose Linux over FreeBSD for a mail server because of this article.
I serve email with qmail on FreeBSD with no softupdates and even the hard-disk cache turned off. Why? Because this is the most reliable mail configuration that I know of, and there are good reasons for all of it (but you have to RTFM to know why..) I can pull the plug amidst a flury of email and *know* that none of it is lost, and the machines can still move 100x more mail than they do.
Tuning for max performance is the Linux way. Unreliable async filesystem operation is the norm in the Linux world. Getting max performance out of a system that doesn't compromise on corectness and reliablility is the BSD way. When you choose to turn on softupdates on your FreeBSD machine, you still know that you can punch the reset button at any time and your filesystem metadata will still make sense. In fact, under Linux, you can fsync() a file and still not be sure that the metadata is updated when the call returns. Humbug!
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I find it amazing that someone would set out to test for VM performance, and run the tests that he ran. Sendmail? Tweaked and (even more than usual) unreliable Sendmail? Someone is going to choose Linux over FreeBSD for a mail server because of this article. I serve email with qmail on FreeBSD with no softupdates and even the hard-disk cache turned off. Why? Because this is the most reliable mail configuration that I know of, and there are good reasons for all of it (but you have to RTFM to know why..) I can pull the plug amidst a flury of email and *know* that none of it is lost, and the machines can still move 100x more mail than they do. Tuning for max performance is the Linux way. Unreliable async filesystem operation is the norm in the Linux world. Getting max performance out of a system that doesn't compromise on corectness and reliablility is the BSD way. When you choose to turn on softupdates on your FreeBSD machine, you still know that you can punch the reset button at any time and your filesystem metadata will still make sense. In fact, under Linux, you can fsync() a file and still not be sure that the metadata is updated when the call returns. Humbug!