Real Insight on Performance

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Rahul <rahulone at gmail.com> (from Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:17:46 -0400):

> For example: I would like to run a high performance web server that
> can handle up to 200 connections per second and serve them with great
> speed. That's where the concern for multi-threaded support. Depending

Serving 200 connections per second for static data is not hard. And  
you don't need multi-threading for that. Multiple processes is  
actually better than multi-threading in this regard, as you don't have  
to do locking of filedescriptors in the the webserver over multiple  
threads. The difference between linux and FreeBSD should be not big  
for single CPU/core systems, but if you increase the number of  
CPUs/cores this may be different. See the postgresql (it uses  
processes, not threads like mysql) graphs in  
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/7.0%20and%20beyond.pdf to get  
an idea about the scaling of more or less independent processes in  
FreeBSD.

> on the request, I may have to load (and possibly unload) dynamic
> modules to perform calculations, and if need be, fetch data from
> either DB or flat file. It could involve connecting to a process on

As soon as you have calculations and/or DB accesses involved, it  
mostly depends upon the DB optimizations ("good" tables, indexes, data  
volume, queries, good concurrency of the DB, ...) and the computation,  
not on the OS. So without any specific workload, we can not really  
give recommendations (besides giving FreeBSD a try and working with us  
if there's problem).

> another box to get request specific command strings. This process
> could run for almost 20 hours straight and OS still has to be able to
> keep in shape.

The OS doesn't care about how long a process runs. But if you talk  
about good responsiveness of the OS while a process uses a lot of  
memory and CPU, FreeBSD will handle it good (and from what I heard and  
seen better than Linux, but I don't have numbers at hand).

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
  Leela: Well, someone's in a good mode.

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137