Re: Best suiting OS

[Karl Denninger <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

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