New != Faster

[Tim Daneliuk]

Chris wrote:
> On 04/06/07, Colin Percival <cperciva at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Tim Daneliuk wrote:
>> > Old   2 PIII @600Mhz           768K    26M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP
>> > 50-60 min
>> > New   Pent D (2 core)@3.2GHz   2G     50M/sec    6.2-stable/SMP
>> > 40-50 min
>> > Fast  2 Xeon @3GHz             3G    130M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP
>> > 8 min
>> >
>> > Is the difference in speed
>> > attributable to 4.11 being faster than 6.2?
>>
>> Close.  The difference in speed is due to the compiler in 4.11 being
>> faster than the compiler in 6.2.  FreeBSD uses the gcc compiler, and
>> between FreeBSD 4.11 and FreeBSD 6.2 that has been upgraded from 2.9
>> to 3.4.  The general trend each time gcc is upgraded is that it takes
>> 2x longer to compile code, but produces code which is 5% faster (as a
>> result of "working harder" to find optimizations).
>>
>> FreeBSD 6.2 is faster than FreeBSD 4.11 for almost everything except
>> compiling itself. :-)
>>
>> Colin Percival
>>
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> 
> What about all the following observations?
> 
> slower network performance in 6.x especially worse under DDOS conditions.
> slower disk performance especially under QUOTA.
> 
> both of these have been confirmed numerous times by different people
> so sweeping them under the carpet and saying they simply not true
> would be wrong.  My observation of 6.x is that whilst it can exceed
> 4.11 performance this is only because of more more powerful hardware
> and in particular on SMP systems where 4.11 isnt optimised but for UP
> and most older hardware the worst performance of post 4.11 is
> highlighted greatly.
> 
> In thoery shouldnt eg. a 6.2 system using a 3ghz core 2 duo be
> multiple times faster then a pentium 3 500 running freebsd 4.11 due to
> the more powerful hardware?
> 
> Chris

It will be of academic interest to me to see how people respond to this.
Unfortunately - as documented in my original post - the 4.11 CD will
not even boot on this new motherboard for some reason.  Given that, and
that 4.x is no longer actively developed, I am forced to move to 6.x for
my next server ...



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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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