Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (1599)	6/29/1999 7:51:00 PM
From: Arnold Layne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2617

Is this Bad News for MSFT at the next shootout? Can anyone tell me what this will mean in the next round? My impression was that the Linux file system really hurt Linux. Am I correct in understanding that this will change that completely? ====================== File System Based on Radical New Technology Released For Linux Today Jun 29th, 17:59:23 A revolutionary new approach to file system design based on storing everything in a single unified tree was released today. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: (San Francisco) -- Namesys released Reiserfs for Gnu/Linux today. It is a revolutionary new approach to file system design which stores not just filenames but the files themselves in a B*-tree. It is a generation ahead of alternatives which use older plain B-tree technology, and cannot store the files themselves in the tree. Reiserfs doesn't suffer from log congestion either, you can effectively use it for quickly creating a 100,000 entry directory, and it is fairly unique in that. Namesys has Ecila, a french internet search engine company, as its primary customer, and they are basing their search engine on the file system, with plans for using reiserfs to create 30,000,000 entry directories of keywords. Reiserfs is GPL'd, with exceptions to the GPL available for sale. You can get a free copy of Reiserfs at their website. The president of Namesys explains the benefits: ''This new technology creates the long dreamed of technical foundation for adding database and keyword indexing features to the filesystem. That will dramatically lowers the cost of programming for Gnu/Linux by eliminating the need to endlessly re-invent storage management techniques for each application program. At the same time, it makes traditional file system usage go much faster. Reiserfs shipped this week. Even though our competitor's designs are now obsolete, they can't afford to just throw away all of their code and redesign from scratch like they have to to compete. Throw on top of that that they are just now starting porting to Linux where all the growth in market share is going, and it really puts them in a bad spot. We designed for Linux from day one. ''You can see the advantages for traditional file system usage in this dbench benchmark. Dbench simulates the file system load created by Samba servers. Note the 32-68% performance advantage for when the benchmark fits into cache (10 or 40 clients in the chart below) the way Microsoft likes to do the benchmark when it compares itself to Linux. We think this will really help Linux beat Microsoft at the Mindcraft benchmark. It will just get better over time, too. Every week we improve our benchmarks by another 5%. Since the technology is new, and hasn't reached its limit like the older matured file system technologies, with every week the gap between us and them is going to grow wider. For large directories, the performance gain becomes order of magnitude or more.'' Dbench: Reiserfs vs. Ext2 Benchmark description: Dbench is an emulation of the Netbench benchmark that is used in the press to rate windows fileservers like Samba and WindowsNT. The full description of dbench can be found at: ftp://samba.org/pub/tridge/dbench/

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (1599)	6/30/1999 10:26:00 AM
From: Arnold Layne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2617

Linux vs NT Shoot Out in Germany Posted 30/06/99 10:56am by John Lettice Benchmark battles - now Linux beats NT In the wake of the latest in the round of NT versus Linux face-offs German magazine c't has published the results of its own tests of the two operating systems. The c't tests, conducted by Jurgen Schmidt, were intended to assess the two rivals in 'real life' situations of the sort Linux is supposed to be good at. Linux does a lot better than it has in the 'clash of armour' benchmarks we've seen so far, and Schmidt makes a number of eminently valid and sensible observations concerning the real operation of Web servers. (Full c't report) The tests pitted NT 4.0 and IIS against SuSE Linux 6.1 and Apache on a quad 450MHz Xeon Siemens server with two gigs RAM, twin EtherPro 100 boards and a RAID system. One of the first 'real life' differences between the c't and Mindcraft tests was the use of RAID-5 rather than RAID-0. Mindcraft's use of the latter was aimed at performance, while c't went for a more realistic performance/stability compromise. Schmidt also comments on the nature of the Mindcraft test: "Unlike for the Mindcraft test, which required the server to produce its pages through four 100-MBit interfaces we decided on a more realistic scenario. How many web servers actually serve four of these network interfaces? The majority of web servers make do with a 10-MBit interface and even in intranet one 100-MBit board should be sufficient. This was the configuration we chose for our tests. To get an impression of maximum load behaviour anyway, we made the server prove it can handle two Fast Ethernet connections." For serving a static HTML page of 4-8k, the two came out roughly even at 4k, with Linux slightly ahead at 8k. Schmidt notes that both operating systems didn't benefit to any great extent from use of multiple CPUs, although the Linux installation was running kernel 2.2.9, which is better at SMP than 2.2.5. Linux did however performs substantially better in random requests of 1,000,000 4k files. With 512 requesters NT managed to answer 30 per second, and Linux 274. In another test using a CGI Perl script, Linux delivered twice as many pages as NT on a single CPU, and 2.5 times as many with four CPUs. This isn't entirely surprising, as IIS' support for Perl isn't great. NT did however shine when using multiple network boards, and Schmidt comments: "Linux's comparatively bad results when tested with two network boards show that Mindcraft's results are quite realistic. NT and IIS are clearly superior to their free competitors if you stick to their rules." In summary, he feels that "additional CPUs for plain web server operation with static HTML pages are a waste. Even with two Fast Ethernet lines there's only a moderate less than twenty percent increase." The server wasn't needing to work to its full capacity, and the tests were simulating conditions tougher than you'd expect in most real life scenarios. "In SMP mode, Linux still exhibited clear weaknesses. Kernel developers, too, admit freely that scalability problems still exist in SMP mode if the major part of the load comes through in kernel mode. However, if user mode tasks are involved as well, as is the case with CGI scripts, Linux can benefit from additional processors, too. These SMP problems are currently the target of massive developing efforts." In the most relevant, practical areas, Linux and Apache "are already ahead by at least a nose," while if the pages don't come directly from main system memory, they're more clearly ahead. c't was also impressed by the level of support it got from the Linux community. Microsoft was slow to respond to requests for information, while "Emails to the respective [Linux] mailing lists even resulted in special kernel patches which significantly increased performance. We have, on the other hand, never heard of an NT support contract supplying NT kernels specially designed for customer problems." A very sensible report, and well worth reading in detail. ® -------------------------------------------------------- from: << theregister.co.uk >>