Performance 4.x vs. 6.x

[Danial Thom]

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 at gmail.com>
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 at centtech.com> wrote:
> > On 10/12/06 09:19, Danial Thom wrote:
> > >
> > > --- Alexander Leidinger
> <Alexander at Leidinger.net>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >> Quoting Dan Lukes <dan at obluda.cz> (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 at ...
> > >>
> > >> 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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