FreeBSD I LOVE YOU

[Anthony Atkielski]

Xian writes:

X> I installed FreeBSD on a machine with an Athlon 3200 that I accident under
X> clocked to 1.4GHz. I didn't notice for quite a while as the performance was
X> amazing any way. It didn't half go some when I put the clock speed up to
X> 2.2GHz.

I think people nowadays forget how fast computers are.  Remember, UNIX
was designed long ago, at a time when a computer that could hit one
million integer instructions per second was nearly science fiction.
UNIX was therefore designed to be fast, and even today, despite the
gradual evolution that the OS has undergone, it still is extremely fast
compared to certain very bloated operating systems that were written at
a later time, when increasing hardware speeds could conceal laziness on
the part of systems programmers.

Given what older hardware used to support under UNIX, I wouldn't be at
all surprised if you could support 1000 simultaneous timesharing users
on FreeBSD with a modern PC.  If you add X then you naturally gobble up
resources and bring UNIX closer to Windows or the Mac, but if you run a
straight text-only OS, it can be hard to ever come close to the machine
capacity with any kind of real-world load (meaning a realistic load of
the type for which UNIX was intended).

I never seen less than about 97% idle my machine, and the average over
time is closer to 99.9% idle.  The machine is definitely working, but
with a streamlined OS and straightforward applications that don't have
to drive GUIs or play music or animate movies, it flies.

-- 
Anthony