Not to start a war, but...BSD, linux...

[Peter Van Epp]

	While I have been sick for some months and not yet gotten back to 
testing, Redhat 6.3 on 3c509 cards (and a non stock 3c509 driver that is 
better than the 3com default one) was able to keep up with a 100 meg stream
(argus-1.8.1) generated by tcpreplay where FreeBSD 4.1 on the same machine
was not. There may be kernel tuning issues (such as that ktrace was still on
in the FreeBSD kernel) and the numbers are peliminary as I said. In addition
there is a BPF bug in FreeBSD 4.1 and below. It is reported and a patch is
available I think but I don't know if it has made 4.2 yet. It results in 
argus losing (because bpf never passes them up) the last bit of an incompletely
full buffer. I'm hoping to get to doing some performance testing of CPU boards,
disks and operating systems (all on identical machines). I'll note in passing
that our Beowolf maintainer achieved some 294 megs per second on this same 
pair of machines using Redhat 6.3 and 3 channel bonded 3c509 cards which is
pretty impressive.

Peter Van Epp / Operations and Technical Support 
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada


> 
> Does anyone have any performance statistics, or direct evidence, whether
> the latest generation of argus is "better" on a BSD box or a Linux box?
> 
> I'm pondering FreeBSD vs Linux for my new argus install, but haven't
> made up my mind yet.
> 
> Thanks for any opinions...
> 
> 
>