Re: Performance 4.x vs. 6.x

No one said freebsd 6.0 is useless, but I promise
you that 4.x could do any "router" job better
than 6.0. And everyone on the FreeBSD team knows
it. The point is not the freebsd 5+ can't do a
job; its that it doesn't do a job better than
4.x.

DT

--- "Derrick T. Woolworth" <dwoolworth@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

What a load...

Here's a report...

I have over 800 nodes installed in the field
with FreeBSD 6.0 running
as routers on silly little 1.3Ghz machines with
256MB of RAM. They
run Apache/PHP/wSSL enabled, MySQL,
dual-firewall with custom NetGraph
module for Wireless MAC authentication. The
company does over 180k a
month in subscribers in the trucking industry
in the US.

The company has TWO network administrators who
do very little during
the day because the machines NEVER die. If
they do, 99.9% of the time
its hardware related.

I built those systems in 2 months and they
support remote rollout of a
new operating system snapshot and they're
preparing to rollout 7.0
when its stable. I no longer work there - only
on occassion when they
need assistance.

Internally, I have 50 FreeBSD machines hosting
over 600 complex web
applications that my firm has built over the
last 11 years using ONLY
FreeBSD. Currently, they're all running
FreeBSD 6.0 and later and "I"
am the only network administrator in the
company. If I was running
anything else (which, we do run some Windows
machines and they are the
bain of my existence...) I would be too busy to
do anything else.

One of our largest systems has redundant
load-balancers with three
presentation boxes serving web pages out of
memory - again, Apache
w/PHP. These boxes build 200+ page 300dpi PDF
documents for high
school year books (including LOTS of 300+ dpi
student and faculty
images). They're supported by two mid-sized
database machines, one
read, one write (replicated, obviously) that do
200 to 500 queries per
second at busy times during the day. Graphic
data is all stored on
SATA data storage systems, which after a bit of
tweaking scale really
well using NFS and Jumbo Frames - bound
multiple NICs with the ng_fec
module (thank you thank you guys)...

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, once the system was
setup, I haven't had
to touch it - and even "braver" yet, these 2
load balancers, 3
presentation machines, 2 database machines and
2 1.4TB data storage
boxes ALL run 7.0-CURRENT. Call me stupid,
brave, whatever - but 7.0
, with the snapshot release I got is the
fastest I have ever seen
FreeBSD run, regardless of the fact the
hardware is fast. I've tuned
each machine using the online docs and a bit of
help from PHK and Juli
Malette...

Interesting stat - from 10 other machines, I
used ab to toss some hits
at these boxes. Like:

ab -n 1000 -c 20 <url>

The page hit was a test page that did reading
and writing, several
times to the database and read an image, used
MagickWand to resample
them and write the image back.

The average time for the test took 4 to 5
seconds. I achieved around
~220 requests per second per test machine with
75 to 100ms per
request.

I don't want to feed the trolls either, but
sometimes performance is
achieved because you take the time to read and
don't just install the
OS "as-is" and expect it to work well on all
hardware. When
configured properly, in my opinion, FreeBSD
kicks ass.

D

On 10/12/06, Eric Anderson
<anderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10/12/06 09:19, Danial Thom wrote:

--- Alexander Leidinger
<Alexander@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Quoting Dan Lukes <dan@xxxxxxxxx> (from
Thu, 12
Oct 2006 09:43:20 +0200):

[moved from security@ to performance@]

The main problem is - 6.x is still
not
competitive replacement for
4.x. I'm NOT speaking about old
unsupported
hardware - I speaked about
performance in some situation and believe
in
it's stability.

You can't be sure that a committer has the
resources to setup an
environment where he is able to reproduce
your
performance problems.
You on the other hand have hands-on
experience
with the performance
problem. If you are able to setup a
-current
system (because there are
changes which may affect performance
already,
and it is the place
where the nuw stuff will be developt)
which
exposes the bad behavior,
you could make yourself familiar with the
pmc
framework
(http://wiki.freebsd.org/PmcTools, I'm
sure
jkoshy@ will help if you
have questions) and point out the
bottlenecks
on current@ and/or
performance@ (something similar happened
for
MySQL, and now we have a
webpage in the wiki about it). Without
such
reports, we can't handle
the issue.

Further discussion about this should
happen in
performance@ or current@...

Bye,
Alexander.


Maybe its just time for the entire FreeBSD
team
to come out of its world of delusion and
come to
terms with what every real-life user of
FreeBSD
knows: In how ever many years of
development,
there is still no good reason to use
anything
other than FreeBSD 4.x except that 4.x
doesn't
support a lot of newer harder. There is no
performance advantage in real world
applications
with multiple processors, and the
performance is
far worse with 1 processor.

The right thing to do is to port the SATA
support
and new NIC support back to 4.x and support
both.
4.x is far superior on a Uniprocessor
system and
FreeBSD-5+ may be an entire re-write away
from
ever being any good at MP. Come to terms
with
=== message truncated ===


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