[Gllug] just a quick question

[Ian Northeast]

Nix wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Bruce Richardson wrote:

>>Or just look at basic TCP/IP networking, which on Linux is more than a
>>little eccentric.
> 
> 
> Because it *does so much more* than commercial Unixes do. You can both
> outfeature and outperform many expensive dedicated routers with a Linux
> box and commodity network cards. (OK, well, sometimes you need *fast*
> network cards. :) )

Last time I did any serious tests, about 3 years ago, IBM p690s, then 
their top of the range AIX box, slightly larger than an entire rack, and 
costing the best part of a million dollars, running AIX 5.1, were 
outperformed by a fair margin by their commodity 2U Intel servers 
running Linux 2.4 in throughput over Gb ethernet. The network 
infrastructure was the same, everything was plugged into the same Cisco 
switch. AIX<>AIX was slowest, then AIX<>Linux, Linux<>Linux was fastest 
and approached the theoretical maximum, I was getting about 120MB/s.

This isn't necessarily down to the OS, as the Intel servers have Intel 
ethernet on the MB while the 690 has PCI cards (branded IBM, so you 
can't tell who really makes them. They may really be IBM). But the PCI 
cards are 64 bit so they shouldn't be too slow.

And I think I mentioned before a colleague's attempt to show that using 
a PII running Linux as a firewall could be a bottleneck in a 100Mb 
ethernet environment. He failed because it isn't:) Again, Intel NICs. 
You can't beat these IME.

>>                   And everybody knows (or should) that you are much
>>better off running your NFS server on a commercial Unix if you have the
>>capability.

> This ceased to be true *years* ago. I've had no problems with
> interoperability with the 2.6 knfsd, and only one minor problem in all
> of the 2.4 series.

I always used to follow this too. I have had a fair amount of trouble 
with the 2.4 knfsd, but admittedly never with the 2.6. The NFS servers 
in AIX and Solaris are IME much better than the 2.4 Linux one.

We have some EMC "Celerra" NAS servers. Under the covers these are 
Linux, but EMC elected to write their own NFS server code from scratch 
rather than use Linux's. We've had these for a while, I don't know what 
they're doing now.

Regards, Ian

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