FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform.
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And this is just a question, not to take anything away from BSD. Why, after spending all the money on a SPARC, would you want to run a BSD on it? Why wouldn't you just run Solaris which is optimized for it?
Hotmail is powered by Windows 2000 not FreeBSD.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.hotmail.com
No wonder its been crappy out lately :
It used to be though. Although I think the Author should have specified that.
"Hotmail is powered by Windows 2000 not FreeBSD. "
I don't think so. Last time this conversation came up, it was apparent that microsoft was still running FreeBSD but just doing a really good job at hiding it. If you use certain url's, you'll see that FreeBSD is still doing the hefty work.
is even doc`s from ms on the web to prove it, and a friend knows the Indian, wich name I can`t remember made hotmail, not possible to convert 4 million accounts+++++
your hdd was running in WDMA mode. Try using atacontrol to enable UDMA33 (in case the drive supports it 
)
Why does MS use FreeBSD for thier Hotmail service instead of thier own Windows OS? There own product aint up to the challenge? Heh.
There have been several threads on freebsd-current@ lately about performance issues with MySql. Most of them boil down to either the threading library being used to compile MySql (iirc linuxthreads seems faster and more stable than the alternatives), or (mis)configurations of the DNS resolver. I don't know what compile-time options were used to build the binary you tested, but perhaps you should look into the above issues before blaming the hard disc or the kernel of the operating system itself or anything else.
The company they bought hotmail from originally had it on BSD. They claim to have switched most of it over to Windows, but this article claims otherwise: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeMisc/2001/2001-MS-BSD.htm... This article is almost 3 years old though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Yes, yes, they do. However, they've been trying to convert HoTMaiL over to Windows and IIS from the first day they owned it. They had horrible failures trying to convert to NT4 Server. They had moderate success with Windows 2000. But, last I heard, they only converted over the front-end webservers to use Win2K and IIS. The backend database servers are still on Solaris, and the mail servers or DNS servers or something is still running FreeBSD 4.x.
To the public, it looks like they are using Windows technology. Behind the scenes, there's very little Windows in use.
Solaris is truly one of the best implementations of UNIX derivatives whether closed source or Open Source. And it's binary compatible with so much Linux code. If you have never run it, go to sun.com and download it. It's industrial strength and fully 64-bit for Solaris and will be 64-bit for AMD64.
- Andrew
will freebsd run on ultraspark 3 and 4 processors?
...to have FreeBSD running at least in sun4m (sigh*) ....would be really, really cooooool....
Bsdero
but OSnews lov Redhat??
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.osnews.com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=login.passport.com
at least some gateway machines run FreeBSD i guess...
anyway back on topic, I wish I had a sparc64 machine to test FreeBSD Sparc port on it.
As noted in the release notes for 5.2, this branch is still in heavy development and is not optimized for performance. You should not expect good benchmark performance from it. This should hopefully be substantially addressed by 5.3, at least as far as network performance goes.
LinuxThreads is the way to go ( http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000697.html ) on FreeBSD right now -- too bad it's only ported for i386. Recently users have reported success using MySQL with the new KSE (libpthread) threading library. I would love to see you revisit this comparison (and throw Linux 2.6 in) when FreeBSD 5.x goes -STABLE with version 5.3.
I can see FBSD being nice on the UltraSparc platform... I run 5.2 on two 4 way Alpha 2100's it is rock solid, fast and easy to use.
The FreeBSD folks in #freebsd on freenode are very very helpful too!
OK.. this guy can't find a terminal emulator (hint, TeraTerm, Windows Hyperterminal?) that does a VT100 emulation???
I wonder if the author disabled all of the debugging options, which are enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel for the 5.x branch, and recompiled the kernel? I've noticed performance increases after these were disabled.
The reviewer was running 5.2.1-RELEASE. The 5.x releases have debugging options turned off.
Don't use the arrow keys, use - and + to move around.
Just use OpenBSD or NetBSD for Sun4M, I run both at home. OpenBSD on a SS-5 (170MHz) with a QFE for a router/firewall/www/ssh and then NetBSD on a SS-LX just for fun.
Great machines.
The default kernel has a fair amount of debug stuff compiled in. It used to warn you of that in /usr/src/UPDATING.
Try compiling the kernel with the debugging options removed and you should see a speed improvement.
I tried a 5.1 for Sparc and had trouble with ports. I finally gave up and decided to wait for a more stable version. I will give this a try.
I also had the same experience with the keyboard during installation. It is a lot easier to install on X86 hardware.