Performance comparison of Linux and FreeBSD

Thomas Pornin (pornin@bolet.ens.fr)
Wed, 20 Jan 1999 13:18:07 +0100


In article <Pine.GSO.4.05.9901200143180.21221-100000@dragon> you write:
> Partly out of interest, and partly for a production OS choice, I have
> decided to do a comparison of FreeBSD against Linux. I would like whatever
> input/opinions can be thrown at me before I begin.

You might want to test web|nntp|database server on ufs and ext2 for both
systems: linux now reads and write ufs, and (as far as I know) FreeBSD
handles ext2. It is possible that, depending on the task, one filesystem
would be intrinsically more efficient than the other (*).

I heard reports stating that Jaz drives are not well suited to anything
except sequential read and writes: bad swap performance, reduced drive
lifetime, and so on. Maybe you should install both systems directly on
the harddrive (both with a 1 GB partition, inverting them with dd and a
spare partition [or Jaz disk] at the end, to check the importance of the
partition emplacement on the disk).

--Thomas Pornin

(*) By the way, if you find some mkfs.ufs that would run on linux, I am
interested. Porting it from the BSD world is a bit hard, since it uses
many heavily imbricated header files.

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