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From: orc@pell.chi.il.us (Orc)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
Date: 9 Feb 1996 11:49:02 -0800
Organization: The International Queer Conspiracy
Lines: 53
Message-ID: <4fg8fe$j9i@pell.pell.chi.il.us>
References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <strenDM7Gr4.Cn2@netcom.com> <DMD8rr.oIB@isil.lloke.dna.fi> <4f9skh$2og@dyson.iquest.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: pell.pell.chi.il.us
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:13990 comp.os.linux.development.system:17603
In article <4f9skh$2og@dyson.iquest.net>,
John S. Dyson <root@dyson.iquest.net> wrote:
>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
Do you have any concrete evidence to back up this assertion?
No, this isn't a Linux vs FreeBSD debate, though it's certainly
one of the things that makes FreeBSD less attractive for my news
machine; I keep people one one side stating that writing metadata
out of order is safer than treating metadata like anything else,
and I've seen people on the other side mentioning that writing the
metadata, then, at some distant time in the future, coming back and
putting the data down opens a wonderful window of opportunity for
squeaky-clean-looking but completely garbaged files. And my
experience running news on filesystems without synchronous metadata
writes certainly hasn't shown any vulnerability, even when I've
been running beta software like a software disk array that showed
the distressing tendency to lock up and die when being driven hard.
(Okay, so it's possible that every time it died it caused filesystem
problems only on the articles which I didn't read, but it certainly
never corrupted the directory structure; that's only happened when
I've foolishly dropped too many power eaters into the machine and
had the disks starve in the middle of a metadata write.)
____
david parsons \bi/ Or is this another "FFS is faster than ext2fs,
\/ and it doesn't matter than the bsd buffer cache
is three times as fast" debate?