*BSD News Article 61568


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system
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From: root@dyson.iquest.net (John S. Dyson)
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
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References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <311250C2.2781E494@public.uni-hamburg.de> <strenDM7Gr4.Cn2@netcom.com> <DMD8rr.oIB@isil.lloke.dna.fi>
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 09:50:09 GMT
Lines: 32
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:13903 comp.os.linux.development.system:17478

In article <DMD8rr.oIB@isil.lloke.dna.fi>,
Riku Saikkonen <rjs@spider.compart.fi> wrote:
>...
>>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.
>
FreeBSD is sensitive to the order in which you do the stat.  Those problems
are being worked.  You'll quickly see which one performs the best when
the systems are under heavy load.

>
>So it might be more the program you're using (unless you use enough memory
>to swap the thing out). Mine is a single C program of about 800 lines...
>
Yep, FreeBSD is sensitive to that.

>
>There's one thing I've been wondering about... From what I've seen, FreeBSD
>seems to default to fscking the drive every night, while Linux defaults to
>every 15th (? something like that) reboot. However, in my two years of
>running Linux, I've never found a filesystem error except for the few times
>when I rebooted non-cleanly. Is the FreeBSD filesystem more prone to errors
>or are the distribution-makers just more paranoid?
>
Linux is more vulnerable to filesystem problems due to the delayed writes
of metadata (and is the reason that FreeBSD is slower on file
create/delete benchmarks.)  We added an async option to our FSes to make
the system perform much faster, but with similar risk as Linux has.  The
fsck's at night are a *mistake* and should be removed.

John Dyson
dyson@freebsd.org