*BSD News Article 55767


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From: root@dyson.iquest.net (John S. Dyson)
Subject: Re: Linux vs FreeBSD
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References: <489kuu$rbo@pelican.cs.ucla.edu> <48ajsj$f5p@galaxy.ucr.edu> <490p3m$6c7@news.iii.net> <30B47F81.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org>
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 11:14:45 GMT
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:28690 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:9570 comp.unix.advocacy:11533 comp.unix.misc:19722 comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit:8900

In article <30B47F81.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org>,
Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>Craig Shrimpton wrote:
>> 
>> In article <48ajsj$f5p@galaxy.ucr.edu>,
>> 
>> >
>> >They are both bitchen.
>> >
>> I think FreeBSD excels in fast networking and I/O activity but I think it
>> makes a terrible Web server or shell machine.  Linux is more suitable for
>> interactive type work but blows as a network router.
>
>May I ask by which data you came to your conclusions?
>-- 
Web servers require quick TCP connect times, disk reads and (given use of cgi
scripts) fork/exec times.  FreeBSD is very good at each.  The key is (as in
any system with SVR4/SunOS style shared libs) to build frequently executed
programs static.  My measurements have shown that FreeBSD is on par with Linux
for fork/exec when both systems use shared libs (FreeBSD-SunOS, Linux-SVR3), and
is faster than Linux for fork/exec when both systems do not.  Note that I
would expect that Linux-SunOS (ELF) would be even slower.  There are some
very impressively (big, not just 10K-100K hits/day) large Web sites
that use FreeBSD -- very effectively.

Also, except under certain circumstances, FreeBSD has very smooth
performance (and has had for quite a long time) when using X-windows in
an interactive environment.   Some changes were made in '94 (a long time ago)
to fix the BSD scheduling algorithm especially in the area of interactive
response.

FWIW,

John
dyson@freebsd.org