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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
Date: 12 Feb 1996 00:08:07 GMT
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
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Message-ID: <4fm0d7$ivs@park.uvsc.edu>
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rjs@spider.compart.fi (Riku Saikkonen) wrote:
] Hmm? An article statistic program of mine took about 7 minutes to stat about
] 3400 articles (it reads them all straight through once, directly from the
] news spool, collects some statistics to memory, and lastly writes a summary
] to a file on disk). There wasn't much else running at the same time, and
] this machine is a 486-50 with 8 Mb RAM, ISA bus, and and oldish IDE drive
] (no acceleration features besides Linux's default multiple-sector mode
] enabled, I'm lazy :)).
BSD is potentially slower on stat operations because it obeys
the POSIX mandate of "Shall be Updated". There are situations
where POSIX mandates "shall be marked for update". Directory
access times is not one of these, unless you cop out and claim
that directories are not files and claim that the do not have
to obey file time semantics because of this.
] 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?
I might as well ask whether the fact that you've never found a
file system error reflects on the respective capability of the
checking tools to reliably find errors. 8-).
The real reason that BSD checks every night is that there was
a facility for implementing daily administrative activities, and
one of the things that got put in there was a nightly fsck. It
should be noted that this check is totally unnecessary, and has
(or should be) removed in subsequent releases of the /etc/daily
file.
Note that even if you have not updated releases for a long time
(and so are comparing "most recent Linux" with "old FreeBSD" when
you make a comparison), the file system is not offlined during
daily checking, so it does not interfere with the ability of
the system to function normally.
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.