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From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon)
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: 31 Mar 1997 23:05:41 -0800
Organization: BEST Internet Communications, Inc.
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Message-ID: <5hqc45$hlm@flea.best.net>
References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5hn00k$dio@fido.asd.sgi.com> <5hnam9$393@hoopoe.psc.edu> <5hp7p3$1qb@fido.asd.sgi.com>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38312 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6554 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29621
:In article <5hp7p3$1qb@fido.asd.sgi.com>,
:Larry McVoy <lm@slovax.engr.sgi.com> wrote:
:...
:>
:>Yup, they would. And if the hardware made any substantive difference,
:>you would be absolutely right. But in the lmbench paper, the P5
:>that FreeBSD was on was actually slightly faster than the Linux P5.
:>It's hard to claim I was skewing the results against FreeBSD. And it
:>is also hard to claim that I was skewing the results against Linux.
:>I've measured lots of PCs and the difference between 120 & 133 is just
:>not enough to be an issue, it's in the noise.
:>
:>I'm happy to be proven wrong. I'm waiting....
:>--
:>---
:>Larry McVoy lm@sgi.com http://reality.sgi.com/lm (415) 933-1804
Larry, no matter what the results, you can't seriously be advocating
that testing two OS's on two different platforms is scientific (!).
Well? Yes? No?
I've worked with both FreeBSD and Linux. Personally, I tend to consider
FreeBSD a bit more robust under heavy loads, and I like the somewhat
greater formality. On the otherhand, if someone came up to me and
blithly asked which OS he should install on his home PC, I'd probably
recommend linux just to be sure the guy could get *something* up and
running without too much trouble. It all depends where you are
coming from.
While I could certainly argue this issue on performance, I could just as
easily argue the issue leaving performance out of it. Performance is
important, but the difference between 15 and 30 micro seconds
to make an mmap() call is not. Now, 1 and 15 uS... that would be
something. 15 verses 30? No.
And as far as these damn benchmarks go... I'll tell ya, they are WORSE
then useless most of the time. When I'm not crying over the thousands
of people taken in by web server benchmarks, who base their decisions
on the numbers despite the fact that 98% of them could run their pages
off a 486 without noticing the difference, I'm laughing at everyone,
including myself sometimes, who both try to dismiss their reliability
while at the same time argue, STRENUOUSLY, over their value.
-Matt