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From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community"
Date: 18 Mar 1997 14:05:04 -0800
Organization: BEST Internet Communications, Inc.
Message-ID: <5gn3ig$83d@flea.best.net>
References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5g90qg$aj6@innocence.interface-business.de> <5g9hjp$api@flea.best.net> <5gmb58$6jd$1@news.clinet.fi>
NNTP-Posting-Host: flea.best.net
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.sco.misc:36933 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37426 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6400 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29307
:In article <5gmb58$6jd$1@news.clinet.fi>,
:Kristoffer Lawson <setok@FIX.TIN.DOMAIN> wrote:
:>Matt Dillon (dillon@flea.best.net) wrote:
:>
:>: FreeBSD has, frankly, a much more serious development team. They care
:>: about security, they care about doing things the right way, they
:>: care about keeping the core and surrounding utilities reasonably up
:>:...
:>: but it doesn't change the fact that FreeBSD and BSDI are both serious
:>: operating systems, both better supported and more professional then IRIX.
:>
:>Hm, last I heard, FreeBSD had serious troubles when running under heavy
:>loads on some Internet servers around here, totally crashing their machines.
:>I also doubt FreeBSD supports any sensible SMP or filesystems like XFS etc.
:>though I admit I haven't been following recent development in FreeBSD.
:>After I got the patched IRIX6.3 I haven't had any problems with it and this
:>O2 has been very stable.
:>
:>Oh btw. I'd be interested to know more about the IRIX internals. I
:>guess it's not a microkernel (I'm a great supporter of them ;-), but how
:>easy is it to add device drivers and things like that? Loadable
:>modules? Something even neater?
There was a bug introduced into the adaptec SCSI driver that caused
problems on heavily (I/O) loaded machines for two weeks or so, but
that's just been fixed. We are running some very heavily loaded
machines with both scsi command tagging and scb paging turned on and
they are running just fine. One of them was hitting the bug earlier
and caused problems, but the fix fixed it. None of our other (dozen
or so) heavily loaded machines even hit the bug.
I have a number of machines that have been up for over 90 days, and then
only because we updated their kernels 90 days ago (and are about to do
so again). Even more importantly... the kernels on the machines
have *NOT* gotten fragmented or inefficient due to the long uptimes, a
problem that plagues us on other platforms (including SGI boxes).
All in all, our FreeBSD boxes are several times more reliable then our
IRIX boxes under similar load conditions.
As far as sensible SMP or filesystems 'like XFS' go. I would like to point
out that XFS has only very recently become stable, and only very, VERY
recently has gotten a filesystem quota capability. XFS's only performance
advantage is in directory lookups. It does not have any other advantage
over FFS. Filesystem locks and lockout conditions in XFS are barely
on-par with the locking used in FFS in FreeBSD kernels (whereas in EFS the
locks were substandard). Furthermore, SGI treats RAID functions as
extra-cost items, requiring a licence, rather then as native items. And
they aren't even that good.
Does IRIX even do tagged command queueing for its SCSI devices? Anybody
know?
I would say that XFS is marginally more effective then FFS in dealing
with things like newsfeeds and huge mail queues. But only marginally,
and it socks rocks big time on 64 bit IRIX kernels due to the 16k pages,
which are just too big to deal with a multi-user load.
SGI's NFS implementation appears to be more reliable then FreeBSDs. Not
a big deal for us since we do not use NFS much any more.
FreeBSD's VM subsystem and buffer cache is an order of magnitude better
then IRIX's (5.3 or 6.x) under load. Our IRIX boxes die horribly when
they begin to page, especially when they are juggling a large vnode load
such as the web server which often has over 4,000 active vnodes. FreeBSD's
peformance, on the other hand, tends to stay level even as it begins
to page.
-Matt