Tell them to fire 20K packets/second at the linux box and watch it crumble.
Linux has lots of little kludges to make it appear faster on some benchmarks,
but from a networking standpoint it cant handle significant network loads.
Bryan
> > Hi,
> >
> > I appoligize if this is the improper channel for this sort of
> >discussion, but it is in the best interests of the FreeBSD following,
> >atleast, within my orginization.
> >
> > I work in an environment consisting of 300+ systems, all FreeBSD
> >and Solaris, along with lots of EMC and F5 stuff. Our engineering division
> >has been working on a dynamic content server and search engine for the
> >past 2.5 years. They have consistently not met up to performance and
> >throughput requirements and have always blamed our use of FreeBSD for it.
> >We have humored them time and time again; i.e. they once claimed the lack
> >of some sort of RAID was keeping them from meeting their requirements,
> >when he had already thrown brute amounts of hardware at their application.
> >When we setup a load-testing environment with multiple types of RAIDs, all
> >the systems, including the one without any sort of RAID performed
> >identically. And poorly, at that.
> >
> > We have had a recent change in departmental structure, which
> >unfortunately, weakened the more technical side of the top of the food
> >chain. They have taken this as another opportunity to push for Linux-use
> >within our environment. We do not want, nor feel the need for introducing
> >another OS into the environment.
> >
> > The following are the points that the head of engineering claimed
> >were their requirements and our shortcoming, which Linux would handle
> >well:
> >
> >---
> >
> >a) A machine that has fast character operations
> >
> >b) A *supported* Oracle client
> >
> >c) A filesystem that will be fast in light of tens of thousands of
> > files in a single directory (maybe even hundreds of thousands)
> >
> >Requirement a) means that it won't run well on a Sparc processor as
> >they are notoriously bad at character addressing, and since search
> >makes extensive use of character operations (as does *any* web
> >application server for that matter), using a Sparc processor will be a
> >waste since the x86 architecture (AMD's and Crusoe's especially) do it
> >much better.
> >
> >Requirement b) means it won't be FreeBSD. Yes, you can run Linux apps
> >under emulation, but I'd bet dollars for doughnuts that this will be a
> >support nightmare if we can even get it to work.
> >
> >Requirement c) means it won't be Solaris or FreeBSD since neither of
> >them have a filesystem which handles this effectively.
> >
> >Linux on Intel fits the bill because it meets these three requirements
> >*very* effectively.
> >
> >---
> >
> > I find them to be mostly silly points -- (a) touching on integer
> >math -- pretty moot point given the real meat of this. (b) is wrong, since
> >there is a native port of the oracle client and (c) is just silly -- I'm
> >sure softupdates on a modern BSD ufs is loads faster than ext2fs.
> >
> > Folks, please give me some real technical ammo -- reference
> >internals, give a real technical comparison if possible. I don't believe
> >this is some lame FreeBSD/Linux comparison -- I'm simply trying to
> >tactfully and effectively deal with a zealot. :-)
> >
> > Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > -charles.
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