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From: dillon@best.com (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Was: ISP , now: How Using FBSD?
Date: 24 May 1995 02:24:17 -0700
Organization: Best Internet Communications, Inc. (info@best.com)
Lines: 114
Message-ID: <3puu0i$nqi@shell1.best.com>
References: <3pqb92$lq2@pt9201.ped.pto.ford.com> <D91zw7.J95@tfs.com> <D92Dxq.3C7@aldhfn.aldhfn.org> <D92JoB.B0I@ritz.mordor.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: shell1.best.com
:In article <D92JoB.B0I@ritz.mordor.com>,
:Chris Mauritz <ritz@ritz.mordor.com> wrote:
:>ciaran (ciaran@aldhfn.org) wrote:
:>: Julian Elischer (julian@mailhub.tfs.com) wrote:
:>: : In article <3prh5v$au8@fnord.dfw.net>, <donsethf@dump.com> wrote:
:>: : >Is there anybody out there that is using this software as an ISP? if so
:>: : >please contact me.:)
:...
:>
:>: I'm using 2.0R here. It handles the shell accounts and news. News
:>: is handled by nntp and cnews. It also holds the pop mail boxes for dialup
:>: slip and ppp accounts. The terminal server actually handles the slip and
:...
:>I currently use BSDI 1.0 (with lots of patches) as my main workhorse
:>machine. It has absolutely no problems supporting 40-60 simultaneous
:>users.
:>
:>Hardware:
:>
:>Intel Plato P-90 mboard
:>256k cache
:>96mb RAM
:>Buslogic 946C scsi controller
:>bunch of barracudas
:>couple of decserver 700 terminal servers
:>lots o modems in 2 separate POPs.
>T1 to the net.
:>
:...
I'm in a good position to compare BSDI to FreeBSD as well.. we
started out running BSDI 1.1 but are now beginning to shift
everything over to FreeBSD. Frankly, the only reason we went
with BSDI in the first place was for the technical support...
so much for that, it isn't all that hot, and BSDI tends to hold
their cards close to their chest and penny pinch a lot... I finally
decided that it wasn't making MY job any easier, and then they
made a very disapointing 2.0 release and that was it for me.
Having Dima Ruban on our team capped it... if you've got someone
on your team who knows FreeBSD inside an out why stick with BSDI?
I have to say, however, that with appropriate tweaks BSDI 1.1
is very stable. We jerk the hell out of our BSDI shell machine...
during the day there are upwards of 130 users logged in at once, over
200 pty's in use, and occassionally upwards of 180MB swapped out
(machine has 128MB of ram, 300MB of swap). The machine generally
takes it quite well. Appropriate tweaks include mainly massive
increases to kernel resources such as network mbufs, network
clusters, etc etc etc...
Unfortunately, BSDI 1.1 has a terrible paging algorithm (read:
near non-existant) so when the machine starts to page it tends
to thrash soon after and has a cascade failure... major sludge
beyond all proportion. And you don't dare run out of swap
on a BSDI machine, that will cause a guarenteed crash.
We have already shifted our admin and news machines over to FreeBSD
2.whatever and they are working as reliably as the previous BSDI 1.1
install. I am especially happy with the NEWS machine... under BSDI 1.1,
NEWS was constantly paging and even thrashing with 64MB of core.
Under FreeBSD, NEWS is a happy camper with four full redundant feeds
and about 80 NNTP users during the day. There were a couple of
minor problems here and there, but nothing compared to when we had
first installed BSDI. FreeBSD beats the hell out of BSDI when it comes
to SCSI throughput, especially with those cheap $70 NCR PCI SCSI cards.
And I managed to inadvertantly test what happens to FreeBSD when it
runs out of swap :-)
We shifted outgoing sendmail from our shell to a FreeBSD machine
and, well, while shifting the queue of nearly 3000 messages over
I kinda went overboard in running the queue. I *accidently* allowed
too many sendmail's to get going on the FreeBSD machine... each
temporary connection from shell was forking off a more persistant
sendmail on the FreeBSD machine to send the mail off onto the internet.
Around 500 sendmail processes, in fact. Ooops! First the machine starts
paging... I didn't take the hint. Then it starts thrashing.. .ok
I say, FreeBSD can handle that (and still didn't take the hint).
Then, oops, the machine runs out of the 150MB of swap I had given
it. Oh my. (at this point, a BSDI machine would crash). It
was painful... su'ing to root from an existing login session on
the console took nearly 30 minutes! That's right, one line of typing
took 30 minutes to give us a '#' prompt. The machine was really
choking (I was scared to death of hitting ctl-alt-del or pushing reset,
but I was tempted to just pull the ethernet :-)).
But it didn't die... we managed to kill the sendmail daemon that
was spawning the sendmail's that our other machine was throwing at it,
and the FreeBSD machine recovered completely!
*THAT* is impressive.
--
We have the same problems everyone else has... runaway processes
on disconnected pty's, people running AUB (GIF slurpers) or, worse
, emacs-based GIF slurpers.... tin and nn processes that eat cpu
on startup and take a minimum of 6MB of core apiece, sometimes
growing to upwards of 10MB of core, etc... My feeling so far
is that FreeBSD is much better suited to handle these problems,
especially in memory-starved conditions, then BSDI. I am being
somewhat unfair since I am comparing the 4.3 based BSDI 1.1
with FreeBSD 2.0.whatever, but I consider FreeBSD 2.0.whatever
to be nearly as stable as BSDI 1.1 and much, much more stable
then BSDI 2.0. I wouldn't even consider installing BSDI 2.0
on a production meachine for at least another couple of months.
-Matt
--
Matthew Dillon VP Engineering, BEST Internet Communications, Inc.
<dillon@best.com>, <dillon@apollo.west.oic.com>
[always include a portion of the original email in any response!]