different behaviour between 4.x and 5.x (ping response/disk io) [was Re: ...

[Freebsd0101 at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/16/05 7:43:15 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
stheg_olloydson at yahoo.com writes: 

>>Now i am really puzzled because i cannot understand why 4.x behaves 
>>relatively good compared to 5.x on this specific issue. Is there a
>>good explanation or does one have to investigate this further?

>Also, as you saw yourself, using an SMP kernel in FBSD 5.3 doesn't
>cause a performance hit in networking but it does in NBSD 2.0.
>So your choices seem to be use 4.11RC2 (full release due shortly) to
>get the best network response, 5.3 to get as good performance as NBSD
>2.0 but with SMP, or use NBSD 2.0 to get as good perfomance as 5.3 but
>without SMP. Of course, you can wait until NBSD (your prefered OS)
>performs as well as FBSD, but that may be a loooonng time.:)

Of course you won't be able to run 4.x on the latest hardware, because 
they've stopped supporting such things. What "puzzles" me is that they call 
5.x the "production version", even though they seem to know its not there yet. 
So
(sadly), you can't run the fastest version on the fastest hardware.