*BSD News Article 60944


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From: dwatson@abwam.com (Darryl Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Increasing cache ?
Date: 8 Feb 1996 13:47:38 GMT
Organization: ABWAM, Inc.
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Message-ID: <4fcutq$rrs@hops.entertain.com>
References: <823673122.24218@loddon.demon.co.uk> <4faic3$fv9@sidhe.hsc-sec.fr>
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In article <4faic3$fv9@sidhe.hsc-sec.fr>, roberto@keltia.freenix.fr (Ollivier Robert) says:

	[snip]

>You don't  need a parameter  on  FreeBSD. FreeBSD  has a unified  VM/buffer
>cache system where all available mmory can be used a buffer cache.
>

I'll say!

I have BSDi 2.0 w/ patches running on my main server, which is a 486/66
EISA system w/ 32MB RAM, and a P5/100 PCI/ISA running FreeBSD 2.1.0-
release w/ 16MB RAM.

I ran accounting on both; on the 486/66, my accting perl script thrashed
my hard drive for 4.5 hours, massaging a 2MB accouting file.  On the
FreeBSD system, the 2MB accounting file was read once into memory, and 
the disk wasn't physically accessed after that.  Total run time: 20
minutes!!!

I also ran the same test on a 200mz, 64MB RAM SGI WebForce Indy that came 
straight out of the box.  Runtime: 15.75 minutes.  I imagine that if
the system was tuned a bit, it would significantly reduce processing
time.

The fact that FreeBSD has almost all the same tools as BSDi., looks like
BSDi, but supports Adaptec 2940s, and is infinitely cheaper, is making
us switch to FreeBSD.