>
> Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 17:56:00 -0800
> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
>
> Which is a rather porous argument, to say the least.
>
> Morons: "We've proven that our car goes much faster than the
> competition's does when we have all 4 doors open, due to the
> superior wind-resistance characteristics of our door design."
>
> Competition: "Why in god's name would you want to optimize for that?
> Who in their right mind would drive with all the doors open?"
>
> Morons: "You're just jealous. Beat our open-door numbers or shut up."
>
> The situation is not the same.
>
> Likewise, testing things like loopback vs actual transmission
> performance or no-load machine response is just as silly as optimizing
> for the corner case of driving with your doors open. Who bloody
> *cares* what the results of a meaningless benchmark are, and why would
> you ever want to get "better numbers" in an area of trivial
> measurement where the only real result is to look better on some
> marketdroid's tally sheet, no doubt obfuscating the code in question
> and perhaps even degrading performance for the cases your users
> actually *do* care about.
>
> You assertion poorly assumes that all of us agree that the benchmarks
> in question are in fact meaningless. Many people (people in the "real
> world") will disagree with you.
>
> And as for the marketdroid's tally sheet, that sells machines
> pinhead. If you think it does not, why does the government spec
> lmbench numbers for all purchases these days? What concrete numbers
> are you able to put on that tally sheet? None, because whatever
> benchmarks the freebsd people are using to perform their improvements
> are under lock and key, most likely because once the Linux crowd had
> these at their disposal, we'd fix the problems they show because
> they'd be trivial. I'm not concerned.
>
> I think it is funny how the Linux crowd brags about numbers that
> anyone can grab the sources for and run for themselves. Whereas the
> freebsd people brag about performance characteristics that they claim
> _they_ can test and get numbers for, but the rest of the world has to
> wonder whether such benchmarks even exist.
>
> Those tactics might sound good to Microsoft or (though I hope not)
> Linux, but the fact that many people use FreeBSD in *real world*
> situations where performance under extreme load (>1000 users) is
> paramount means that optimizing for these scenarios counts for far
> more than chasing some micro-benchmark, and this is what has led John
> to focus on specific types of performance over others. We wouldn't
> have it any other way, and you tell me - which is better for us,
> making thousands of simultaneous TCP/IP connections work properly or
> shaving another microsecond off a meaningless latency benchmark?
>
> I'll give you an hour to answer that question, and you may use a
> calculator.
>
> I prefer the abacus, but thanks.
>
> As for scalability. I have numbers (available upon request) where I
> ran 100 streaming tcp connections between two (very low end) machines
> in parallel, and the bandwidth and latency numbers scaled very nicely
> with a variance that was all lost in the noise. Perhaps I should post
> those results to usenet as well.
>
> Also, SparcLinux pushes ~17MB/s over _software_ RAID, thats close to
> the theoretical maximum for 16-bit synchronous WIDE scsi.
>
> I'll be running numbers with 50 or so workstations pummeling a web
> server over 3 or 4 100baseT lines and 4 10baseT lines, we'll see if
> your arguments hold. And if they do, I have to thank you, because you
> have shown me a way in which my system can be improved.
>
> And my systems are used in real world high stress situations as well
> mind you. High load news servers run SparcLinux with zero problems,
> and performance that blows SunOS/Solaris out of the arena (I can put
> people in touch with the people who are running these systems if they
> want verification).
>
> So my performance translates into real world, so I don't want to hear
> your whining over this matter any more.
>
> Oh yes, and our main Linux mail server btw runs SparcLinux, over a 100
> lists, the most active ones (say 10 or so) have many thousands of
> subscribers. It is multiuser, holds all my CVS sources, has a full
> FTP archive, and runs an actively used web server. Oh and btw, this
> is a dinky 40MHz SparcClassic (4k I and D caches, thats it) with 40MB
> of ram and two SCSI disks. The load never goes over 4.
>
> ---------------------------------------------////
> Yow! 11.26 MB/s remote host TCP bandwidth & ////
> 199 usec remote TCP latency over 100Mb/s ////
> ethernet. Beat that! ////
> -----------------------------------------////__________ o
> David S. Miller, davem@caip.rutgers.edu /_____________/ / // /_/ ><
>
>