FreeBSD bind performance in FreeBSD 7

[Mike Tancsa]

At 10:44 AM 2/29/2008, Chris wrote:

>A weakness of freebsd is its fussyness over hardware in particular
>network cards, time and time again I see posts here telling people to
>go out buying expensive intel pro 1000 cards just so they can use the
>operating system properly when I think its reasonable to expect
>mainstream hardware to work, eg. realtek is mainstream and common as a

A realtek as in rl (not re) works quite well (as in stable, 
predictable performance)-- we buy these for about $5 each from our 
supplier and are quite common.  While it would be nice that all 
network cards worked as well as the em nics, its an issue that is 
easy to work around-- after all, I would rather be limited by my nic 
driver choice as opposed to vm and network stack issues which I cant 
work around.  Also thankfully, a large chunk of the server MB market 
uses em nics.  Yes, bge/bce based nics do seem to perform poorly on 
FreeBSD.  Hopefully Broadcom might put similar resources into driver 
development as Intel does/has.

         ---Mike