[ LUGOS ] Re: RTFM

[Studded]

Frank Pawlak wrote:
> 
> Can anyone tell me where I can locate some accurate and current information
> describing why FreeBSD can carry heavier server loads than Linux?  

	Linux' kernel was designed for 256 fd's. It can be extended beyond that
with some gymnastics however fundamentally the whole thing was not
designed for "heavy server loads." The BSD networking layer has no such
restrictions. 

	We had a network consisting of almost all linux servers when I started
on dalnet almost 3 years ago. Ours was the first machine to try FreeBSD
and it wasn't very long before there weren't any linux boxes left. :) 
Now there are a few new linux machines but they are all in .eu where
their client load is extremely small. 

	Our experience with linux was that after a given period of time under
load (that period varying with factors we were never able to clearly
determine, but never more than 4 or 5 days) the networking layer would
just give up and the server would become non-responsive over the network
even though the machine was still up (active at the console). At the
time there were several people in the linux world who were confirming
that the failure was in the networking layer, including one of our
programmers who contributes to linux. 

	The word is that the 2.1 version of the linux kernel fixes "all" of the
networking problems, however in our tests we have yet to get a linux 2.1
machine to hold more than 400 clients reliably, which is approximately
where the 2.0 series failed as well. Of course, I have very little
confidence in the person running the linux test, but I don't actually
care that much either. :)

Doug

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