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BSD Operating Systems

Wcarchive Does 1.39tb In 24 Hours 116

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fastest-if-the-fast dept.
Josef Grosch writes "Walnut Creek's FTP machine, wcarchive, running FreeBSD transfered 1.39 Terabyte in a single 24 hour period. "
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Wcarchive Does 1.39tb In 24 Hours More

Wcarchive Does 1.39tb In 24 Hours

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  • FreeBSD has a feature that allows you to have more filesystem than disk. It's actually pretty useful (argh, filled up / ).

    Check the FreeBSD handbook entry for how to do it:

    http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ/FAQ52.html#52 [freebsd.org]
  • I haven't laughed like this in ages.

    ... Same kernel, same apps ...

    and even better...

    ... great support from Microsoft. It can also play games ...

    Hah!
  • The actual theoretical when you consider layer 2 overhead is about 1.07TB. Then subtract Layer 3/4
    overhead, the global Internet packet loss rate (which averages about 7%), and FTP overhead, and you end up with about .97TB. Prior to this weekend's gigabit ether test, the record was .969TB, which seems to confirm this.

  • Round up to 954,841 and THAT'S how many floppies it would take to hold that much data. Wonder how long it would take to split that? Any estimates? =)

    Well, zipping a large file to disks here, without compression, takes a fairly regular 80 seconds per disk....so....

    80 * 954,841 == 76,387,280 seconds == 21218.69 hours == 884.11 days == 2.42 years (roughly).

    Not bad for a days work. :-)

    Umm...(Score:2,Informative) ? (ahem!)

    dylan_-


    --

  • Linux VM system doesn't scale. You can tune it to a given load, but it just won't be able to adapt to different loads.

    Though I suspect this issue is not relevant for wcarchive. For one thing, since it's sole purpose is serving files through ftp, it doesn't need to adapt to different load usages. For another thing, I doubt it ever swaps... Not that Linux can handle 4 Gb of RAM on ia32, but...

    Nevertheless, there are still gains in the handling of memory on the FreeBSD. David Greeman _is_ one of the responsibles for the vm subsystem in FreeBSD, and has been so for a long time.
  • They don't seem to offer *any* other pre-loaded operating systems other than Windows NT.

    They could get early market share on FreeBSD pre-loaded servers.

    If they don't, I'm sure someone else will...

    Any Free/Net/OpenBSD VARs out there?

  • Would be too hard to make it real - What would happen if tomorrow morning you read in Slashdot about such a benchmark? I can assure you that thousands of people would be requesting more and more info from the free server, and hundreds would be sending DoS attacks to the NT one... :)
  • Topic says it all.
  • No, but using a network monitor to count the bits for us would be quite easy to do.

    Just reset the count every 24 hours.
  • When I had an IDE disk, a Samsung 3.2 GB drive, it ran pretty well, but you have to realize that FreeBSD is really more of a server/workstation OS, and no server/workstation should really use IDE. PCs, which happen to be Linux's domain (more so than FreeBSD), however, do not need SCSI, and can do fine with IDE.
  • Well, let's do this together!

    Supposedly 1,391,836,770,942 bytes have been transferred (bout 1.39TB).

    A floppy disk has 2827 usable 512-byte sectors. Do the simple multiplication and that floppy disk holds 1,457,644 bytes.

    After some division fun you get 954,840.6017724.
    Round up to 954,841 and THAT'S how many floppies it would take to hold that much data.

    Wonder how long it would take to split that? Any estimates? =)

    --Rob
    ------------------------------------------------ -
    void docrazythings(){
    docrazythings();
    }

  • Re:honest question, just curious (Score:5)

    by imp ( 7585 ) on Monday May 24, 1999 @09:46AM (#1881267) Homepage
    The biggest easily identifiable things that make FreeBSD be able to handle this load are the CAM subsystem (to serve up the data fast), which Linux currently lacks. Justin Gibbs did an excellent job of getting close to the max performance out of SCSI with CAM. Linux's SCSI subsystem is primitive and slow in comparison. It lacks good error recovery and mixes too many levels of abstraction. While it does work for most people most of the time, I would doubt if it could drive the I/O subsystem as fast as FreeBSD does.

    I'm biased. I work with Justin here at Pluto, and we have Video server machines based on FreeBSD that are disk bandwidth limited. It is very fast and I'm very impressed with it.

    Warner Losh
  • But I don't want to use any microsoft contribution, besides WHAT CONTRIbUTION?????
    your M$ put alot of money on kernel research. WHO CARES, I wish you die soon for what you said here. I dont want you to post anything here, you don't belong here, Go play around somewhere else, DIE YOU MORON.
  • I want a gf that dares me to make posts on Slashdot.
    I think that'd be cool.
  • While I'm never one to bash linux, or even NT for that matter (ok, maybe a little), The last post looks pretty funny to me:

    couldn't have done it without us? sounds a little like BSD envy to me.

    all in good fun, all in good fun......

    --atdot
    (bsdie)
  • (Score:-1, Flamebait) -what the hell is THIS about?! I'm a pro-linux user. If you can't see the humour here then don't moderate. I was doing my best Darth Vader in light of all the M$ crap flying around here. See that name up there.."Khan"...that means "really cool linux mofo". Remember it! :P
  • Does anyone here know how to switch this controller to 80M/s on Linux - I can only get it to work at 40M/s on Linux 2.2.8. Not that this speed is critical - I'm not having much luck finding hard drives that'll do 80M/s, I'm just curious.

    Thanks.

    perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'
  • IDE is okay for occasionally-accessed small amounts of data, but for things like workstations or servers (servers like wcarchive), SCSI is definitely the best choice.
  • "Welcome to wcarchive - home FTP site for Walnut Creek CDROM. There are currently 4963 users out of 6000 possible. This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5. The operating system is FreeBSD. 100Mbps colocation services provided by CRL Network Service." (from ftp://ftp.cdrom.com )

    Up until just recently the box was a lowly 200pro as far as i know and was still setting records.

    Daniel Harvey
  • The subject says it all. What exactly _is_ your point?

    This is genuine curiousity here. Your point went right by me. :/

  • Re:What's the machine config? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was NEVER a lowly 200pro. It was a 200pro with a lot of RAM. Serving up 13 MB/second sustained on a system with modern SCSI hardware (disks and host adaptors), a large file system cache, and modern network cards (that do bus mastering DMA) is not a CPU bound task.
  • The claim came from the server generated stats.

    What exactly would you propose we do? Count the bits one at a time as they leave WC CDROM?

  • Re:honest question, just curious (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let's put it this way. Theoretically, we'll say that the server can use the entire 100 Mbps capacity of the connection, all day long. A day lasts for 86400 seconds.

    Total theoretical bandwidth: (100 Mbps * 86400 seconds) / 8 bits per Byte == 1.08 TB (assuming
    1000000 MB == 1 TB).

    Of course, overhead will drop this number some, but they must be saturating their Fast Ethernet line continuously!
  • That such a popular FTP mirror will be naturally sending a lot of data. The 1 Terabyte mark was expected by anybody who's been paying attention to the latest hardware upgrade on the server. The claim that the 1 TB mark was faked can be easily refuted by the popularity of wcarchive.
  • This IS news, but only because the record went over 1TB. If they set one over 2TB, that will be news, and the same if they do it over, say, 5TB -- 1TB, like the 1TFLOP in supercomputing (though less significant) is important, because another order of magnitude of transfers has been reached.

  • Perhaps a new benchmaking technique? (Score:4)

    by Xunker ( 6905 ) on Monday May 24, 1999 @08:50AM (#1881285) Homepage Journal
    After all the flap about Linux-vs-NT, how about a *real* realworld benchmark -- Have the OS in question pull a 24 hour shift as the WCArchive server-- Whomever puches packets faster and crashes less, wins!
  • Are we sure that this is flamebait? To me it's so funny that it can be nothing other than sarcasm and could pass for a story on Segfault with just a little bit of polish.
  • Ohh! I really did miss the point then. I thought you were attempting to dispute the claim.

    Apologies!
  • You're confusing terabytes with megabytes, I'm afraid. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, whereas a terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

  • Re:Wow. (Score:1)

    by DES ( 13846 )
    Actually, it servers more RedHat installations than ftp.redhat.com and all other mirrors added up.
  • I think we can safely say this was meant to be sarcastic, why does it get a -1?
  • Let's see...it's the official server for FreeBSD and Slackware Linux, as well as being a mirror for NetBSD, Red Hat, TurboLinux, Debian and Suse (check in the Sunsite dir for Suse). They also have a lot of ID Software stuff (don't know if they're an official mirror, but it looks like it). They seem to have a lot of other things, but I haven't really explored the UNIX or Windows stuff yet.
  • I'm a pro-linux user

    Yes, and your post was probably interpreted as a shot at FreeBSD.

  • If it's an FTP server it's real easy to see what OS it's running.
  • Are you an idiot, or just kidding!
  • Congrats to the BSD guys on this one. :)

    I'm just curious what the machine config is OTHER than the gig ethernet. :)

    _Deirdre
  • Posted by Mr Spock:

    I would also like to echo your sentiment.

  • read the file [cdrom.com] describing the configuration.

    It's a Siliconrax SR-485 rack mount peripheral chassis [siliconrax.com] with a built in 9" or 10" monitor

    It also houses the Mylex [mylex.com] DAC960SXI SCSI-SCSI 6 channel RAID controller, w/256MB cache.

  • Okay, here's a question (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OS design is a matter of comprimise, especially with general-purpose operating systems. Linux and the BSDs have to accomodate people using machines as web servers, or as HTTP clients, or as single -user machines, or all of these at once and more. This necessitates comprimises between such things as portability, and speed, and generality, and code-ability of features, and so on.

    My question is, why not take one of these general-purpose OSes and, for some given task, hard-code in optimizations? This new OS could still remain backwards-compatible with the old OS, so it wouldn't really be a fork.

    The sort of optimization I'm thinking of here would be along the lines of giving some daemon a hard-coded place in memory, or some similarly evil thing. (I recall hearing that NT did something along these lines; a discussion of it came up on one of the /. Mincraft threads.) Or are Unix derivatives so versatile with kernel tuning parameters and such that a single-purpose OS (ServerBSD, perhaps, or "Servix" :) would be unnecessary?
  • If Hotmail couldn't do it with Microsoft's backing, I can't imagine it being worthwhile here without it.

  • Re:All Hail FreeBSD! (Score:3)

    by Eg0r ( 704 ) on Monday May 24, 1999 @09:11AM (#1881306)
    Come on, who ever said the majority of Linux users were narrow-minded morons? ;-) Some kids have to grow-up, sure, but I guess it's all about freedom of choice and what system(s) suits you best.

    With Linux getting such media attention, it's normal that some people in the community don't get the message or the point or whatever... It's like everything else, kids come, get bored and go away...

    I'm definitely impressed with *BSD, and may well give it (them?) a go when I have a PC for it.

    Anyway, the point is, we don't fight each other mind you, we just fight world domination by ONE and unique operating system... I want choice! I want the best system for the task, whichever it is... And if FreeBSD is that much better than other systems for File/Web/FTP servers, well, I'll just have to try it by myself!

    Repeat after me, we're not fighting each other, we must keep an open mind and as they say over here, what have I contributed to the community today?

    ---

  • The second you have to access two disks simultaneously, IDE looses. If you make each one a master, then you are really putting them on two different controllers.

    If you have lots of disk access, lots of disk, there is no way IDE can compete. Even more if you want your CPU time for other things. Ever heard of tag queues?
  • You just don't tell the public when it's going to happen. They know it's going to happen, I guess, but not when. One day, Walnut Creek is running off NT. The next, Linux. I'm sure it could be done with a modicum of fairness, at least.
  • I know you're being sarcastic, but...
    Microsoft put alot of money into kernel research to make the NT kernel, thats why its so much better.
    Better than what? Stepping in a turd in bare feet?

    The free un*x programmers have put a lot of love into kernel research/development to make their kernels, that's why they are superior to NT.

  • Absolutely! This is the first time any public FTP server has transferred over 1 terabyte of data.
  • But the mindcraft study was between Linux and NT, so in this context it would be pointless. Now if you wanted to use if for a completely new study then that is a different story.
    ---

  • Personally, I try to write "bits" or "bytes" explicitly, so that there's no possibility of confusion. (Except of course there is, because sometimes "mega" means 2^20, and sometimes it means 10^6.)

    http://www.bafug.org/NewRecord.html [bafug.org] implies that the amount of data shifted really was 1.39*10^12 bytes in a day, which I reckon comes to around 15 megabytes a second on average.

    1.39 terabits/day wouldn't be news.

  • Actually, the connection can't keep up with the disks. This recent record (of over a tb) was due to the recent upgrade to gigabit ethernet. With the previous 100Mb ethernet, a tb was a mere dream.
  • b stands for bits, while B stands for Bytes. So tb really is terabits, while terabytes should be abbreviated as TB.

    Same goes for the first letter: T is the real symbol for Tera(=10^12), while M is for Mega(=10^6) and m is for milli(=10^-3), D is for deka(=10^1) and d is for deci(=10^-1). t has no special meaning, so it may also be understood if used for Tera although I would not recommend using it this way.

    My PC has 32 MB of RAM, while my modem transfers data at a speed of 33 kb/sec - You see de difference.

    :-)
    ms

    PS: I'm missing SUP and SUB for super/subskripts - Rob, pls add them


  • But it's more than just 13MB p/s. I'm sure almost any modern OS, including NT, could pump through 13MB p/s. But cdrom.com is doing much more than that. It's managing 5000 concurrent connections as well. I don't know that any OS could do that _and_ still pump out 13MB p/s.

  • Why? Because the point of the Mindcraft survey was to denigrate free UNIX, of any stripe. Whether it's FreeBSD or Linux it sheds doubt on their veracity either way.
  • I agree, FreeBSD and Linux RULES!!! I'm glad to see that it is hitting the spotlight a lot more ofter. Now if we could just be a little nicer to each other......
  • I boot freeBSD 3.1 and Linux 2.2.* and NT 4.0 on my SMP box and theres basically no difference between freeBSD and Linux except Linux has faster disk performance (on my hardware)

    You are most likely not running the comparisons in a fair setup. The default setup of the filesystem on Linux is to gamble with the users' data (metadata is trashed on uncontrolled reboot); the default setup on FreeBSD is to not gamble with data. If you want to compare the FS speed of Linux and FreeBSD, the following comparisons are (reasonably) fair:

    • Linux default mode (async) vs FreeBSD in async mode
    • Linux default mode (async) vs FreeBSD with soft updates (in this comparison Linux is unsafe and FreeBSD safe)
    • Linux sync mode vs FreeBSD sync mode
    The best mode for FreeBSD is usually soft updates mode; this is not the default mode due to licensing restrictions (the license the soft updates code is available under is about as restrictive as the GPL, which is much more restrictive than FreeBSD consider OK).

    As for the TCP/IP stack of Linux being faster: This does not surprise me; I expect it to at the very least be faster for anything that can be micro-benchmarked, and probably as fast as the BSD stack under real world load, too. Dave S Miller has done a very good job. If we (*BSD) have an advantage for real world load, I expect it due to that not being as easy to measure, so we may have an advantage due to actually having run under real world load for a long while).

    As for SMP: In my opinion, neither FreeBSD nor Linux is really up to snuff. Attempting to judge between them is really pointless.

    Eivind.

  • FreeBSD also has much better SMP support than linux does, UFS is also a little faster than ext2 (so I'm told but I may be talking out of my ass). The new WC server has like 4 Xeons, and a bunch of RAM. I would guess that if it were on linux they would have to drop the user limit back to 3000. But thats just a guess.
  • Well, I have no comment as to how well Linux could do in comparison to FreeBSD, but will this machine even be the same on Linux. ie. Can linux even access 4GB of RAM on x86 hardware? Last I heard it was about 2GB.
  • _BECAUSE_ it is running FreeBSD.
  • Why? The machine is not running Linux, it is running FreeBSD.
    ---
  • FreeBSD is more or less linux: Same kernel, same apps, so Umm.. I think not. FreeBSD is based on 4.4BSD which was developed by Berkerly. Linux is a homemade kernel done up from scratch. Sounds like someone needs to do there homework.
  • Posted by LocNar:

    Now you all know the Power of the FreeBSD side!
  • Quick, submit that machine to mindcraft! :)

    --

  • honest question, just curious (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 1999 @08:49AM (#1881337)
    Realistially, what would happen if you substituted say... Linux or (god help us all) NT for FreeBSD on that machine. Seriously, would it suddenly grind to a halt? What exactly is special about FreeBSD that makes it and it alone able to dole out data at that rate? To me (and I am not an expert by any means) it sounds like most of the ability of this site is dictated by the amazing disk I/O subsystem. This is an honest question, not a flame or criticism of anything. I am just curious.
  • Wcarchive has a single Xeon processor and is not
    running an SMP kernel.

  • Re:What's the machine config? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think it works this way:
    with 40 MHz bus/16bit wide:
    single ended : 40M
    Low Voltage Differential: 80M

    You need to have all your drives and terminators LVD enabled(and no SE devices connected to the same chanel) to run in Ultra2 mode.

  • Re:What's the machine config? (Score:5)

    by Travis Ruthenburg ( 24525 ) on Monday May 24, 1999 @08:50AM (#1881342) Homepage
    According to ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wca rchive.txt [cdrom.com], 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

    The file contains more detailed information on the configuration. Also, there's a picture available here [cdrom.com].

  • Your system is too small. Try running with multiple disks on multiple busses and you'll see a huge improvement with CAM over anything else.

    Justin Gibbs, who wrote cam, also wrote the aic7xxx driver. When it is ported to Linux, much of the error recovery is gutted because Linux's SCSI subsystem doesn't handle things as well,
    espcially in the error recovery realm. One of the things that the Pluto boxes can do is you can pull out a disk at any time and the device is dynamically removed from the system. When you hot plug it back in, it dynamically added back to the system. You just can't do that with Linux when the disks are active.

    We use the AIC chips on our pluto box (something like 12-16 of them for all the channels), so it has to be fast....
  • fyi, cdrom.com box *is* a heavyly tweaked system (userland for sure, kernel almost certainly).
  • Please, please, please...

    Read the name under which the submission was made.
  • this clearly is a joke, not flaimbait
    i get the joke!

  • IDE Rulez (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously,

    I use both IDE and SCSI on my servers and workstations.

    For large data stores that are rarerly accessed but "must" be online, the new large IDE drives are way-fine, plus the price can't be beat. For the price of a single 50GB SCSI drive I can throw together a computer and 80GB of IDE storage. Transfer speed of these linux boxen over our 100-Base-T network keeps up (and even outpaces) the striped 18GB SCSI drives on our NT server....

    Is it as reliable as SCSI? No, but all the data is on tape. Will it hold up under heavy multiuser access??? Probably not, but not every server needs that sort of muscle......

    Ditto for workstations. I'll take two or three 20GB IDE drives any day over a single 18GB SCSI drive....

  • Yeah, I suppose. But we all want fair tests, right? We as a community decried Mindcraft's tests. We'd be awful big hypocrites to not treat that hypothetical test fairly by subjecting it to anything less than normal (per se) traffic...
  • On the other hand just what would it cost for a
    5000 user regestered copy of win-nt4, more than the machine ?
    Span...

  • As a FreeBSD user, I'm proud of what the FreeBSD has accomplished. But I agree with you. Is this really as impressive as it seems? Could Linux achieve this performance?

    A much more interesting comparison (especially for us FreeBSD users!) would be against NT. I'd love to see Microsoft provide NT running on the same hardware. I'd accept Walnut Creek going 24 hours with NT to see how it would compare...

  • How many of us here have gotten their shiny new version of FreeBSD (3.2), Slackware (4.0) or Red Hat (6.0)? Who was downloading game cheats and such? How about downloading Seti@Home from them? Did anyone download something from cdrom.com's XFree86 mirror yesterday? How about their GNU mirror? See my point?
  • This is not a troll, dammit! It's a joke...have you never seen a certain extremely popular Monty Python movie?

    Mike
    --

  • I can see it now... (Score:4)

    by nicedream ( 4923 ) <brian@@@nopants...org> on Monday May 24, 1999 @09:23AM (#1881356) Homepage
    Pretty soon all those people that complain, "Rob, a new Linux kernel comes out EVERY week! Is it really Slashdot news-worthy?" will be saying "Rob, cdrom.com sets a new transfer record every week! Is it really Slashdot news-worthy?"

    And I love every minute of it.
  • I'm a FreeBSD Beastie, but I still seem to know more about Linux than you..

    Linus, not Linux. Linus likes penguins, *Linux* is the kernel. As for *demonic unix roots*. What?!

    But I do agree on one point, the Linux logo sucks. The *BSD logo rules.

  • Is your GF from Microsoft?

    No, that's GPF.

    dylan_-


    --

  • The Stats Have A Tale To Tell (Score:3)

    by Athos ( 11806 ) on Monday May 24, 1999 @08:41AM (#1881361)
    630 GB for the linux tree... (slackware, perhaps?)
    120 GB for the FreeBSD tree...
    13 GB for Seti@Home...
    1.5 GB for cheats (seems low for a scr1pt-k1dd13 area)
    1 GB for XFree86 (heh)
    and at the bottom...
    /UPLOADS.TXT 2k.

    --

  • I've seen the Pluto systems when I was up in San Jose at the Bell Micro manufacturing facility. Now THAT was truly an impressive hardware layout. I didn't get to see too much, but from what I saw of the mainboard (looked like 20 Adaptec chips in parallel, each running a dedicated SCSI disk), I can't imagine a NIC connection that could keep up with it.

    It certainly blew the socks off the RAID that WE were assembling there... ( 3 NCR Tolerant style chips with 6 drives on an ultra-scsi bus per chip)
  • Logs are there for anyone to see.

    "Unscientific"? What is it in your definition of "scientific" that makes this claim "unscientific"?

    This is *NOT* like a golfer alone at midnight. WCArchive is accessible 24 hours a day, and you can see it's logs at any time. Moreover, there are a lot of people out there partially responsible for this record.

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