Re: Best suiting OS

Claus Guttesen wrote:
>> However, I have certainly seen some inefficiencies with Linux and large use
>> of shared memory -- and I wouldn't be surprised if these problems don't
>> exist on FreeBSD or OpenSolaris.
>>
>
> This came on the freebsd-performance-list a few days ago.
>
> http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=13001+0+current/freebsd-performance
>
Geezus - that's a BIG improvement.

I have not yet benchmarked FreeBSD 8.x - my production systems are all
on FreeBSD 7.x at present. The improvement going there from 6.x was
MASSIVE. 8.x is on my plate to start playing with in the next couple of
months.

8.x, I will note, is NOT YET RELEASED, and you're playing with fire to
run it in a production environment at the present time. I've been a
strong proponent (and user) of FreeBSD for years, going back to when I
ran my ISP on it. It has had its problems from time to time as do all
operating systems, but when 8.X is released and is stable it will
definitely be worth moving to - IF its stable.

I have systems with two years of uptime on them running FreeBSD 6.x in
production use, and haven't had an actual OS crash on a production
FreeBSD machine in a very long time.

One thing FreeBSD has focused more and more on is SMP efficiency and
effective utilization of all the cores in the system. I have several
systems running 8-way SMP (Quad Xeons) and a couple running the
CoreQuadExtreme (4 physical cores w/2 threads each via HT) and get
excellent performance out of all of them. The key is to make sure your
I/O subsystem is up to the job and split storage across spindles and
controllers as necessary so you don't run into bottlenecks there.

-- Karl