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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!tezcat!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!arclight.uoregon.edu!super.zippo.com!zdc!szdc!szdc-e!news From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@freebsd.org> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux vs whatever Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:10:46 -0500 Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine Lines: 49 Message-ID: <32F0C806.167EB0E7@freebsd.org> References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <5cm5h3$bfg@lynx.dac.neu.edu> <5cmv5q$k6d@cynic.portal.ca> <5co7vd$lvt@lynx.dac.neu.edu> <5coib1$jvv@cynic.portal.ca> <5cqe32$d22@halon.vggas.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 3.0-CURRENT i386) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:155207 comp.os.linux.networking:66704 comp.os.linux.setup:94661 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2143 comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy:51412 comp.os.os2.advocacy:264482 James Youngman wrote: > > In article <5coib1$jvv@cynic.portal.ca>, cjs@cynic.portal.ca says... > > >Two years ago it did not. I've not done any testing recently or > >seen any tests that I would consider more than tentative, but from > >everything I'm still hearing, Linux networking still does not > >perform as well as BSD networking. However, this is not an issue > >that I really care to debate; so if you wish to assert that Linux > >networking is just as good without some solid testing to support > >you, I'm not going to refute that. > > Let's not get carried away here. Even BSD networking is not the best. A few > years ago VJ did a reimplementation of the BSD stack that entirely did away > with mbufs and (IIRC) nearly doubled its speed. Unfortunately this > implementation isn't widely available (at least, I've never seen it). > You have brought up an interesting point, and I would like to expand on it. I think that we are many times too quick to run a simple benchmark and infer too much from it. It is amazing to me that someone will run a tcp(latency|transfer rate) benchmark and conclude that OS1 networking is 10% faster than OS2 networking. Frankly, a 10% difference running an LL benchmark is most of the time overshadowed by other performance aspects of the OS. Bragging rights should be reserved for measurable true (real application) performance differences :-). Speed isn't the only measure of quality though, and the end users who stress the systems should carefully qualify their OS (esp if free.) (Take a look at the async vs. sync metadata -- it is a design decision, perf vs. reliability.) So what if Linux networking is 10% faster/slower (even 20%) in benchmarks? What tradeoffs and design decisions are accompanied with the speed difference? It used to be that Linux networking was ALOT slower and much less standards compliant than *BSD's. It IS better than it used to be, and in some ways might be faster/slower than BSD, but is not twice as fast, and is probably not twice as slow. Considering that it is a reimplementation (learning from BSDs mistakes), and probably performs approximately (+-10%-20%ish) the same in many areas (speed-wise), indicates that it might be harder to create a fully functional networking stack that is TWICE as fast as *BSDs than first glance implies. John dyson@freebsd.org