*BSD News Article 60573


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!stren
From: stren@netcom.com (Sam Trenholme)
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
Message-ID: <strenDM7Gr4.Cn2@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <311250C2.2781E494@public.uni-hamburg.de>
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 15:09:04 GMT
Lines: 37
Sender: stren@netcom21.netcom.com
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:13182 comp.os.linux.development.system:16530

[Since we are comparing Linux and FreeBSD, in hopefully a constructive way,
 I have posted this to both a Linux and a FreeBSD newsgroup]

>On http://plastique.stanford.edu/ you'll find an extensive
>work comparing Linux(1.2.8), FreeBSD 2.05, and Solaris 2.4.
>
>The jist is:
>- Linux has best FileSystem-Performance (because it's doing FS-Updates
>  asychronously)

Hmmm.... I remeber a long thread where people were arguing this-- and I 
get the sense that FFS was faster than Ext2Fs.

This is actually an issue I am thinking about as I am waiting for a 
"cp -a /usr/spool/news /zip_drive" to finish[1], and have been thinking 
about becuase some scripts I cooked up to thread a www archive of a 
couple of newsgroups takes an hour to make an index with about 1700 articles.

(shameless plug) the database is pointed to from 
http://ucsee.eecs.berkeley.edu/~set/rocky.news.html (end shameless plug).

[1] Obviously, the Zip drive is not the fastage storage medium out there, 
and will be slow despite the underlying filesystem.

Other thoughts:

1) I like the idea of LFS, becuase it looks like it should survive hard 
crashes and power cycles happening without a proper shutdown/unmount 
sequence-- better. I hear the commerical filesystem VeritasFS is really 
good at this.

2) I would love to see a Unix filesystem with dynamiclly allocated 
inodes. Nothing more fun than "no space on device" errors, even though I 
have 25 megs left, because I just ran out of inodes. :-)

-- 
Sam Trenholme - stren@netcom.com - http://ucsee/eecs/berkeley/edu/~set - LINUX!