Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Danial Thom" <danial_thom at yahoo.com>
To: "Greg Barniskis" <nalists at scls.lib.wi.us>; "Nick Withers"
<nick at nickwithers.com>
Cc: <jerrymc at clunix.cl.msu.edu>; <danial_thom at yahoo.com>;
<freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 11:10 AM
Subject: Re: Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?


> Burying your head in the sand is a common method
> used by stupid people that have no answer to the
> truth. I don't blame you; you guys don't want
> your employers to know that you've wasted man
> 1000s of their dollars because you don't know the
> performance characteristics of the hardware
> you've recommended. It must be thoroughly
> embarrassing.
>

I have been busy with other things the last week so I missed
this interesting thread, but I will still add my $0.02 cents.

I've used FreeBSD since 1.0 and 386BSD before that.  As
for claims that the newer versions of FreeBSD are equal or
faster than the older versions, that is simply absurd.  The older
versions of FreeBSD are faster, in many cases a lot faster.
Why?  Very simple, they are -smaller-.  They take less core
ram, their kernels are smaller, there is less code there.  All
you have to do to see this is try booting FBSD 6 on a 80386
and compare it's performance to FBSD 3.X on a 386.  Only
in the area of filesystem performance - such as if you have a
system like a Usenet News system with many hundreds of
thousands of files scattered over the disk, are the newer
versions faster.

But, the fact is we are (hopefully) not all building our servers
on 80386's these days.  When the cost of multi-gigahertz
equipment is as low as it is, and the cost of even 2-3 year
old single gigahertz name brand servers are so cheap, this
discussion is really of no importance whatsoever.

Historically in 95% of
installations out there, the way they solve speed problems is
to throw money at faster hardware.  As a business owner it
costs me less money to replace every last stick of server
gear in my big business every 2 years than to pay for the
insurance on the van out back that the delivery boy drives.
Only in extremely esoteric and high end database centers
and suchlike do they start to care about code optimization
and speed.  And I will wager that nobody on this list is
running one of those installations.

I do agree with Danial that most USERS on this list are
burying their heads in the sand on this issue.  But I will
point out that there isn't really any reason they shouldn't
be.  What the market wants is features, not speed.  And
that is what the FreeBSD developers are working on.

Ted