3 ms·

For that to be impressive to me, I also want to know how Linux compares. I suspect that for most non-synthetic workloads, Linux will perform about as well. I ma

For that to be impressive to me, I also want to know how Linux compares. I suspect that for most non-synthetic workloads, Linux will perform about as well. I may be absolutely wrong -- but my gut feeling is Linux is really good at scaling as well, and has a lot more "real world use" sitting behind it, with a lot more paid engineers fine-tuning it to perform well with actual workloads. That's why most people aren't going to use Dragonfly over Ubuntu when they're deploying their servers.

toast0 5y ago
> a lot more paid engineers fine-tuning it to perform well with actual workloads. Just because it is / can be fine-tuned for the workloads of those engineers' employers doesn't mean it is fine-tuned for your loads. If you're running your servers hard, you probably might considering pay engineers to fine-tune your system. There's certainly room in both FreeBSD and Linux for improvements, depending on what your servers are doing; I'd assume Dragonfly is in the same boat. I may be biased from work experience, but IMHO, the FreeBSD can feel a bit more organized and easier to tinker with; FreeBSD having a kernel debugger certainly helps a lot with some things. If you had infinite resources, you'd run some of your servers on Linux and some on FreeBSD (and maybe some on a purpose built OS just for you, but that requires a large value of infinite resources), and when one does some things better, you can pull ideas back and forth as needed to get all things working better. Of course, some ideas are harder to pull back and forth, and sometimes small differences in ideas make for large differences in results. For a lot of use cases, the kernel / OS doesn't make a huge contribution to overall performance. As long as you don't use something tragically bad, it'll be fine. There's a pretty narrow set of circumstances where the kernel is the limiting factor, and I say that having spent quite some time working on problems where the kernel was the limiting factor.
- spijdar 5y ago
  > For a lot of use cases, the kernel / OS doesn't make a huge contribution to overall performance. As long as you don't use something tragically bad, it'll be fine. This is what I was thinking, but did a poor job communicating. I think that Linux, because of all the work poured into it, will usually be good enough. Even though its been less meticulously constructed than DFly and didn't have as much forethought put into picking low overhead SMP algorithms and data structures and what not, in the end, the differences between Linux and DFly in performance will be pretty minimal. So when faced with using a strange and novel platform with software incompatibilities and possibly a slight performance gain in certain situations, or using the familiar, most people will pick the familiar, and for justifiable reasons IMO.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > So when faced with using a strange and novel platform with software incompatibilities and possibly a slight performance gain in certain situations, or using the familiar, most people will pick the familiar, and for justifiable reasons IMO. Yep, that's why I stick with FreeBSD :P I don't really want to learn a new tool for ifconfig or netstat. I'd make a joke about three firewalls, but ;)

toast0 5y ago

> a lot more paid engineers fine-tuning it to perform well with actual workloads. Just because it is / can be fine-tuned for the workloads of those engineers' employers doesn't mean it is fine-tuned for your loads. If you're running your servers hard, you probably might considering pay engineers to fine-tune your system. There's certainly room in both FreeBSD and Linux for improvements, depending on what your servers are doing; I'd assume Dragonfly is in the same boat. I may be biased from work experience, but IMHO, the FreeBSD can feel a bit more organized and easier to tinker with; FreeBSD having a kernel debugger certainly helps a lot with some things. If you had infinite resources, you'd run some of your servers on Linux and some on FreeBSD (and maybe some on a purpose built OS just for you, but that requires a large value of infinite resources), and when one does some things better, you can pull ideas back and forth as needed to get all things working better. Of course, some ideas are harder to pull back and forth, and sometimes small differences in ideas make for large differences in results. For a lot of use cases, the kernel / OS doesn't make a huge contribution to overall performance. As long as you don't use something tragically bad, it'll be fine. There's a pretty narrow set of circumstances where the kernel is the limiting factor, and I say that having spent quite some time working on problems where the kernel was the limiting factor.

spijdar 5y ago
> For a lot of use cases, the kernel / OS doesn't make a huge contribution to overall performance. As long as you don't use something tragically bad, it'll be fine. This is what I was thinking, but did a poor job communicating. I think that Linux, because of all the work poured into it, will usually be good enough. Even though its been less meticulously constructed than DFly and didn't have as much forethought put into picking low overhead SMP algorithms and data structures and what not, in the end, the differences between Linux and DFly in performance will be pretty minimal. So when faced with using a strange and novel platform with software incompatibilities and possibly a slight performance gain in certain situations, or using the familiar, most people will pick the familiar, and for justifiable reasons IMO.
- toast0 5y ago
  > So when faced with using a strange and novel platform with software incompatibilities and possibly a slight performance gain in certain situations, or using the familiar, most people will pick the familiar, and for justifiable reasons IMO. Yep, that's why I stick with FreeBSD :P I don't really want to learn a new tool for ifconfig or netstat. I'd make a joke about three firewalls, but ;)