FreeBSD I LOVE YOU

[Jorn Argelo]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:14:22 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote
> 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.

I'm running FreeBSD 5.3 on my server and it has periods it's just 100% idle. 
I'm running some perl scripts every five minutes, but that doesn't put too 
much load in the machine either. As a matter of fact, it's rare that the 
machine has a higher load of 0.15. And I'm running quite a bit of things on 
that machine (Apache, MySQL, Postfix, amavisd with spamassassin and clamav, 
RRDtool, SNMP, samba and some more stuff).

Though it's a Pentium 4 2 Ghz with 512 MB ram, but I don't have any other 
hardware. Figured I might as well make it a relatively fast machine.

Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great.

Jorn