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#! rnews 2801 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!pumpkin.pangea.ca!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeeds.sol.net!worldnet.att.net!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!super.zippo.com!zdc!szdc!news From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@freebsd.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community" Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 08:12:16 -0500 Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine Lines: 38 Message-ID: <333FB830.41C67EA6@freebsd.org> References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <333EA3EF.41C67EA6@consys.com> <333EE416.ABD322C@FreeBSD.org> <5hn00k$dio@fido.asd.sgi.com> <5hnam9$393@hoopoe.psc.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 3.0-CURRENT i386) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38179 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6529 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29568 Peter Berger wrote: > > Testing FreeBSD versus Linux on the same hardware platform is > truly trivial -- if you're interested in actually doing the work. > You indicated, at that talk, that you were not interested in doing > that work. That's fine. But the community is perfectly justified > in pointing out that drawing any sort of useful comparisons from > said data is impossible, especially when it is clear that *BSD and > Linux suffer different performance hits when starved for different > resources. > I hesitate to respond, because I have very poor communications skills at times, and sometimes appear to be grossly misunderstood :-(. Note that I run FreeBSD, Linux and NT, and there are times that Linux is faster than FreeBSD. It is TRULY easy to compare the two OSes, and there is almost no reason to make any comparative statements without using the exact same hardware as the basis. When I do my comparisons (for my own competitive analysis purposes), I do use the exact same hardware so that the SNR is the best that it can be. (I have no reason to bias my results in order to delude myself.) Whenever I see someone who is a benchmarking "expert" and also who has a strong advocacy position present results on different hardware making a comparison between different software, I find my emotions getting the better of me. It is obvious to me that there are potentially significant problems with the conclusions that might be made by those who haven't studied the benchmarks and results carefully... It is very bad when one who creates benchmarks, and distributes results also has a strong advocacy position :-(. IMO, the biggest difference between the OSes (FreeBSD, Linux) is the relatively free vs. GPL encumbered license terms. John