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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD sets new 1-day download record 37

Posted by Hemos from the lotsa-files dept.
HerbieTMac writes "Congrats to FreeBSD for a new single day download record. Two terabytes (that's 2 trillion bytes!) from a single machine (ftp.freesoftware.com). This was brought about by the simultaneous release of RedHat 7 and FreeBSD 4.1.1."
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FreeBSD sets new 1-day download record More

FreeBSD sets new 1-day download record

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  • BSD as an operating system keeps getting more and more impressive. Many sites composed of a set of servers and a load balancer don't perform as admiriably. As yes Linux users, I do believe BSD hasus beat this time. Don't whine, congratulate them.
  • I don't think that the new record is something to attribute to FreeBSD. It has been known for quite some time that FreeBSD was able to do this, but network bandwidth has always been the bottleneck. I'll stick my feather in the ass of the guys hosting the server.

    Actually, I was surprised to see that ftp.freesoftware.com 'only' supports 3000 simultaneous users. If I recall well, that used to be 5000 on ftp.cdrom.com
  • Aaah, I see!

    You are really talking about tebibytes [nist.gov], aren't you?

    In other words, 2^40 rather than 10^12. Not that the word will catch on with others than those we know as real PITAs, but there is a term to avoid the ambiguity.

  • It is an SMP system. Look at the readme on the server.
  • No it's not an SMP machine...
    Here is some of the information from the config.txt file on the server:

    "Since so many people ask us about the configuration of wcarchive, here's the
    scoop:

    wcarchive.cdrom.com is an Intel architecture PC machine running the FreeBSD
    operating system.

    Its configuration is as follows:

    Micron NetFRAME 9201 system, consisting of:

    One 500MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU w/512K L2 cache
    4GB of main memory (16 * 256MB 50ns ECC EDO DIMMs)
    1 Adaptec AHA-2940U2W PCI single-channel wide Ultra-2 SCSI controller
    2 Adaptec AHA-3940AUW PCI dual-channel wide UltraSCSI controller
    1 Intel Pro/100+ PCI 100Mbps Fast Ethernet controller
    1 Bay Networks Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter"

    cheers.
  • What?!?! SysV is a descendant of BSD, and didn't come about until years after DARPA had chosen BSD.
  • Nope! It comes from Old English. Daemon was the root word that "demon" forked from. It was an inanimate je ne sais quoi that influenced your actions/decisions.
  • It sounds sooo stupid! "I want a 27 tebibyte drive and a 100 mebibit NIC, please." ARGHHH!!!

    Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 106 bit/s.

    Is this comment actually true? Most people I know--o.k., I admit they are all software or ex-hardware developers :)--refer to 1KB as 1024 bytes.
  • what? doesnt SysV stand for SystemV?, the AT&T version of UNIX... of which BSD was derived from.. BSD was later reincorporated into a later version of SystemV.
  • Dunno, they always seem to have some sort of flaw that lets others do naughty things to them.. but they just won't go away.

    Sounds almost like Microsoft :D
    --
  • Actually it comes from the Greek daimon (god or spirit) whence the English daemon derives (meaning broadly the same, a supernatural being unseen and unknowable) and hence the *nix daemon meaning something that operates in the background and quietly gets on with the job unseen. The English demon meaning an explicitly evil supernatural being is a fork from the daemon root. Ahem!
  • I could be wrong, but wasn't the first system with VM was VMS?
  • I have a terabyte sitting near my desk. It's about the size of a PC - maybe a bit bigger. It's tiny! Anyone want to take bets on when it will fit into something the size of a compact flash?
    --
  • Don't get me wrong, I live FreeBSD and run it on my own server, and couldn't be happier. However I would be interested to hear some good aguments on why Win2k couldn't handle this load.

    From what I understand Win2k makes a really freakin good file serv. Other then the TCP/IP stack and the FTP server (prob Wu-FTP) shouldn't Win2k be able to handle the same load? From what I've seen Win2k TCP/IP stack is actually superiour to BSD's. It's supports far more sophisticed featurs like IO Completion Ports, 3 differnt types of Async IO, Thread Pooling and is fully SMP to at least 8 (DataServer can support something like 64) proccecors.

    So other then "It's buggy, It'll crash" what other evedence is there?

    -Jon
  • You're thinking of SVR4, which isn't really a descendant of BSD as much as it's a BSD compatibility set.

    SYSV is pretty old, late 80's I think.

  • Full duplex?? Otherwise I need to learn some more math because my figures only say that a little over a terabyte is possible in a 24 hour period. Is my figure of 12.5MB/s wrong for for 100Mb NIC??

  • Who's got big balls?
    We've got big balls!
    We've got the biggest
    balls of them all!

    Compliments to Angus young.

  • one 100Mbit and one gigabit. the gigabit adapter can do 10x the theoretical maximum transfer rate of the 100Mbit controller.

  • I'm sure... (Score:5)

    by King of the World ( 212739 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:39AM (#740363) Journal
    I'm sure there are going to be much more informed posts talking about the merits of FreeBSD but really all it comes down to is the following which is to be read in a Keanu Reeves voice:

    Whoa.

  • the devil? its a daemon.. not deamon... its not 'evil'

  • 2 terabytes != 2 trillion bytes (Score:5)

    by Ded Bob ( 67043 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @07:38AM (#740365) Homepage
    Don't start doing what the hard drive manufacturers started doing. When we are talking about small values, it does not really matter. At these levels it can mean a big difference.

    2 terabytes = 2199023255552 bytes

    To find out how much you are off:
    2199023255552 - 2000000000000 = 199023255552 bytes

    This is 185.35 GB which is a lot of data just in itself.
  • Okay, so when I tried to get my head round 2 terrabytes I failed. So I worked out just how big a 2 terrabyte stack of 1.44 FDDs would be. Just under 3 kilometers. Funny, I can't get my head round that either.
  • Yes but it obviously has it's roots in pictures of devils.

    I'd agree with you about the not being evil bit though.

  • Re:eh?! (Score:2)

    by bugg ( 65930 )
    My favorite is how all of the front-page articles always end up talking about Linux.

    "This should be a good example for Linux"

    "Linux has had this support in some alpha form since 2.2.1182-preac8-test1.1"

    And so on.

    And by the way, Terasolutions obviously supports FreeBSD; it was co-founded by a FreeBSD cofounder and core team member :)

  • eh?! (Score:2)

    by zentex ( 176409 )
    why the hell didn't this make the front page? I wonder how many other relevant stories we never see (why yes, i dont have any story blocked in my pref's).

    I'm glad to see someone is wasting just as much B/W as cdrom.com :)

    ---
    remove SPORK.

  • Re:eh?! (Score:3)

    by Duke of URL ( 10219 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @10:19AM (#740370)
    Sometimes I ask myself the same question, why isn't this on the front page? Then I get my wish on the next BSD story and the nearly all the posts on the front page BSD story are worthless. People bicker about how *BSD is dead, not as good as Linux, or how they don't like Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD because they heard something somewhere about him, the list goes on and on. So basically 90% of the posts are off-topic for the story. It's too bad people miss the point and the good news of the story.

    It's nice to hear another story about FreeBSD standing up to the challenge. I'm sure they'll be breaking the record again soon in the near future. Mabye cdrom.com will have a go at the record again. Anyway, I'd never heard about Terasolutions before. They have a nice plain website. Yet another vendor who supports BSD.

  • Nope, you're both wrong. BSD came from Sixth Edition. 1BSD was 1977 or so and SysV was 1983. SVR4 and Ninth Edition are the (earliest) two big commericals that had significant BSD influences.
  • So this must be why I couldn't access freesoftware.com the other day, they were using up all the bandwidth to break their stupid little record! :)
  • ftp.cdrom.com:
    Xeon/500, 4GB memory, 1/2 terabyte RAID 5, FreeBSD, 100 MB colocation by Applied Theory.

    ftp.freesoftware.com:
    Xeon/550, 4GB memory, 400 GB RAID 5, FreeBSD, 1GB colocation by Lightning Internet.
  • The English demon meaning an explicitly evil supernatural being is a fork from the daemon root. Ahem!

    thats exactly what i said. Taking word origins can only go back so far, so then why don't i take the greek one a step farther back to some caveman groan? A line must be drawn somewhere.

  • This is a good milestone indeed! (Score:3)

    by erotus ( 209727 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @09:58PM (#740376)
    Keep in mind that this is a single machine with a single processor. This is not a load-balanced set of servers. I am truly impressed with FreeBSD as a server OS. I have yet to see an NT server perform such a feat. This is probably the reason Hotmail has not been moved onto an NT server. I am a linux user and a loyal one too. However, I think most of us who use linux should not forget the contributions the BSD's have made to UNIX as a whole.

    The University of California, Berkeley used Unix as a research system. It also had a DARPA grant to develop and implement the Arpanet protocols, which became TCP/IP. Companies such as Cisco, Frontier, NetManage, and others based their initial products on implementations of Berkeley TCP/IP.

    Many features we nowadays take for granted were introduced on BSD and only later adopted by AT&T and other vendors: the vi screen editor, the termcap terminal capability database and the curses screen manipulation library, csh, job control, long file names, symbolic links, TCP/IP networking, the socket interface, various r* utilities, etc...

    Keep in mind also, the BSD crowd and the linux crowd have similar goals and aspirations. We both like our respective OS's because they are free and open. We both like our OS's because they are both UNIX, whether the Open Group allows you to call it that or not. Both groups know that either a demon or a penguin can break windows with no trouble at all. Sure, there is the BSD vs. SysV argument and others, but who cares. We are on the same side and we should be learning from eachother instead of starting a flamefest. If you see an honest, educated post about why someone prefers BSD to Linux or vice versa, you should respect their opinion and try to understand why (some feature here) is important in their world view. I am personally looking forward to getting an extra box so I can start learning more about the BSD's.

    cheers.

  • Figures, this is the same week I decided to install FreeBSD onto my 486 via ftp through a cable modem. It took around 2 hours at a minimal install x_X, I just thought ftp.freebsd.org was crap.
  • I think the Borg are probably BSD-powered, though. :)
  • BSD was the first (UNIX?) o/s to implement virtual memory, which was one of DARPAs requirements. this is one of the reasons DARPA choose BSD over SysV.

  • Despite having slowed in recent years, the US national debt is still several trillion dollars.

    Do you know how much a trillion dollars is? It's so much, that if you stacked it up using $20 bills, the stack would probably fall over.

  • ...of course we know if Voyager was powered by BSD it would have never gotten lost ;)
    --

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