is THIS why the 6.2 release seems stalled ?

[Freminlins]

On 10/01/07, Chris <chrcoluk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> A reason why you have less problems is I expect you using premium
> hardware such as scsi, currently I am lucky enough to not be using
> realtek lan cards although I am still having problems with intel nics.


I wouldn't term SCSI as premium. Maybe it used to be, but these days
machines are so cheap anyway. Nearly all our x86 boxes have Intel NICs. I
haven't had problems with them.

the specific nfs issues are related to mounting linux filesystems, I
> am not the only one there is dozens of posts on these mailing lists
> from users with the same problems, usually livelocks or panics caused
> by mounting nfs filesystems on freebsd most seem to have no
> resolution.


Funnily enough, I thought you were going to say you were mounting a Linux
NFS server. It is not surprising that Linux client to Linux server goes
together better than FreeBSD client to Linux server. It could of course be
the Linux NFS server implementation that is buggy, rather than the FreeBSD
client. As I've said, mounting NetApp filers I have no problems at all.

realtek isnt great hardware but is that a good reason for realtek
> performing significantly worse then on linux, shouldnt it be on par?


I don't know. I haven't compared them. They are simply not high performance
network cards. I

issues of performance been worse, the biggest example is probably
> mysql and uniprocessor performance, I understand with ule 2.0 mysql
> performance is signficantly better so there is hope there, I would
> like to see more performance from uniprocessor and the mp safe support
> on nics set to disabled by default to put stability first.


Well, I agree with you on this. MySQL performance on FreeBSD is acceptable
for my purposes (not usually intensive), but it is not as good as Linux.
I've read as much about this as possible, and tried using options and thread
libraries. But this has not fixed the problem.

But, on many other things I don't see a performance problem at all. I think
it's important to give exact examples rather than saying "performance has
been worse". If you said "MySQL performance is worse". I've seen a
performance problem with ClamAV. Funnily enough, both ClamAV and MySQL are
threaded applications, so I'm guessing that the FreeBSD threading is the
source (cause) of the performance problem for these apps.

The installer well that comes down to using a variety of datacentres,
> quite often datacentre staff are not too well trained and mainly used
> to redhat and windows gui installers, so when it comes to freebsd
> there is many datacentres who dont even support freebsd when I ask is
> because they say it wont install, the ones that do support freebsd the
> feedback I get off them is often related to both the installer been a
> pain for them and hardware compatibility.


One of our Windows techies learned how to do a FreeBSD install in fifteen
minutes. If someone really cannot learn it, they shouldn't be anywhere near
datacentres. If they can't handle the FreeBSD install, I have no idea how
they would handle Solaris, which is much less friendly and definitely
belongs in  datacentres. And Solaris on non-Sun hardware has less
compatibiltiy than FreeBSD.

How much testing goes into heavy workloads such as heavy apache loads
> and DDOS attacks?


I don't know. But you are free to vounteer to do this!

I expect my server to not livelock and come back to
> responsiveness after such loads without having to reboot it.  Freebsd
> 4.x was incredibly stable under heavy ddos attacks, freebsd 5.x held
> out but of course was very slow on UP, freebsd 6.x is faster but has
> suffered stability problems.


I agree that the 4.x series was (is) very stable - we still have some in
use.


On the performance side get the sata and raid problems sorted for
> improved hd performance tagged ququeing etc.
>
> Is there a sort of hire a dev button on the freebsd website?


I guess you could make a contribution to the foundation.

Chris
>

Frem.