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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!news.uoknor.edu!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!gatech!news.sprintlink.net!demon!btnet!uunet!news.va.pubnix.com!not-for-mail From: lidl@va.pubnix.com (Kurt J. Lidl) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Was: ISP , now: How Using FBSD? Date: 26 May 1995 11:56:42 -0400 Organization: AlterNet -- Falls Church, Virginia, USA Lines: 59 Message-ID: <3q4tnq$loa@arrow.va.pubnix.com> References: <3pqb92$lq2@pt9201.ped.pto.ford.com> <D92Dxq.3C7@aldhfn.aldhfn.org> <D92JoB.B0I@ritz.mordor.com> <3puu0i$nqi@shell1.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: arrow.va.pubnix.com In article <3puu0i$nqi@shell1.best.com>, Matt Dillon <dillon@best.com> wrote: > I'm in a good position to compare BSDI to FreeBSD as well.. we > started out running BSDI 1.1 but are now beginning to shift > everything over to FreeBSD. Frankly, the only reason we went > with BSDI in the first place was for the technical support... > so much for that, it isn't all that hot, and BSDI tends to hold > their cards close to their chest and penny pinch a lot... I would have to disagree with you on both of those points. First, the service, in my opinion, is worth every penny. When I started testing out the the 2.0 release (during the alpha and beta tests), yes I found a number of bugs. To thier credit, BSDi fixed I think all but one of those bugs by the production run of 2.0. Obviously, more have cropped up since then. Their tech support people have been responsive and have escalated my problems up within their heirarchy until they got resolved. This included making custom kernel memory allocators for the application we were bringing up to speed (USENET news) on that platform. > I have to say, however, that with appropriate tweaks BSDI 1.1 > is very stable. So is 2.0. > We have already shifted our admin and news machines over to FreeBSD > 2.whatever and they are working as reliably as the previous BSDI 1.1 > install. I am especially happy with the NEWS machine... under BSDI 1.1, > NEWS was constantly paging and even thrashing with 64MB of core. This is interesting. I've got what I believe is the probably the busiest news machine in the world -- news15.uu.net. It runs BSDi v2.0, with all thier patches, and the custom kernel stuff that I received from BSDi. On it's best day yet, it did 9.5 GIGABYTES of news via NNTP to some of our customers. Does anybody else come close on a single machine? I'd like to hear it if you do. > FreeBSD beats the hell out of BSDI when it comes > to SCSI throughput, especially with those cheap $70 NCR PCI SCSI cards. Post numbers, I don't believe it. > I am being > somewhat unfair since I am comparing the 4.3 based BSDI 1.1 > with FreeBSD 2.0.whatever, but I consider FreeBSD 2.0.whatever > to be nearly as stable as BSDI 1.1 and much, much more stable > then BSDI 2.0. I wouldn't even consider installing BSDI 2.0 > on a production meachine for at least another couple of months. I wouldn't consider installing FreeBSD 2.0.whatever on a production machine for the next couple of months/years, either. BSDi v2.0 does the job now. -Kurt -- /* Kurt J. Lidl (lidl@va.pubnix.com) UUCP: <ANYWHERE>!uunet!lidl */ /* Don't confuse my opinions with my employer's opinions! */ /* E-Mail info@va.pubnix.com for info on our shell accounts. */