*BSD News Article 21959


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From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: FYI.. benchmarks on linux and 386bsd
Date: 06 Oct 1993 09:49:59 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <MYCROFT.93Oct6054959@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
References: <2CB12A8D.17397@news.service.uci.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu
In-reply-to: jstern@aris.ss.uci.edu's message of 5 Oct 93 08:04:29 GMT


In article <2CB12A8D.17397@news.service.uci.edu>
jstern@aris.ss.uci.edu (Jeff Stern) writes:

   if someone has done a more careful port and measurement than i, and
   also if disk speed or tcp/ip access can be measured, either.

Two things to say about this before I see any benchmark figures:

1) When diddling lots of small files or other operations on file
system metastructure, one must consider that Linux uses write-behind
for this and therefore risks serious file system corruption should the
machine crash.  (Back when Linux crashed a couple of times per day for
me, I had no end of file system corruption which caused me to have to
reinstall.  I assume it does not crash that often now, but this is
still a serious bug.)  This also makes Linux's file systems faster.

2) I have no idea how TCP/IP performance will measure, but last I knew
Linux could not fragment packets, forcing small NFS packet sizes (and
thus *extremely* poor NFS write performance) and making it unusable as
a gateway.