*BSD News Article 30559


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From: acg@kzin.cen.ufl.edu (Alexandra Griffin)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.unixware,comp.unix.solaris
Subject: Re: A good NFS server ?
Date: 18 May 1994 06:43:26 GMT
Organization: Electrical Engineering Computer Teaching Labs
Lines: 30
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <2rcdee$c8@wea.eel.ufl.edu>
References: <1994Apr28.144110.25743@wavehh.hanse.de> <CpC9Fq.I2n@acsu.buffalo.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: kzin.cen.ufl.edu

In article <CpC9Fq.I2n@acsu.buffalo.edu>,
Ziniu "Michael" Wei <ziniuwei@acsu.buffalo.edu> wrote:
>I'm concern about the filesystem speed on Linux.  Can anyone give a
>comparison between Ext2fs and the BSD fastfilesystem used in Sun?

I don't have any real numbers, but in comparing my Linux box to a
friend's comparably-equipped FreeBSD machine (both 486dx2/66's with
IDE drives, 16mb RAM), I've notice that disk-intensive operations like
large inter-filesystem recursive copies are slightly faster under
Linux's ext2fs than on freeBSD.  Based on data from the "top" utility,
it seems that Linux tries to use as much free memory as it can for
disk buffers, while BSD has a definite limit on buffer cache (large
amts. of RAM remain free even during 25+ meg file copies).  As for
Linux vs. Sun, the last Sun machine I did much work on was an old Sun
3/60 (pretty slow).  No doubt Linux would beat one of those, but a
modern SPARCstation may be faster (especially with fast SCSI disks).

One major deficiency wrt Linux is its *very* slow NFS service-- it's
presently slower than that on any other Unix implementation I've used.
Can anyone explain why this might be so?
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 \  / / Alexandra Griffin /// acg@kzin.cen.ufl.edu /
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 \  / / Alexandra Griffin /// acg@kzin.cen.ufl.edu /
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