On Thu, 01 Sep 2005 18:04:03 +0200, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> 
> Reading Fefe's (german language) weblog[1] he writes:
> 
>    ``I'm working on new benchmarks similar to my old ones[2], but I want to
>    measure more this time. I have taken about 30GB of image data from a
>    customer's webserver, and logged about 50.000 web requests, and wanted
>    to replay them as fast as possibl. To measure the filesystem I want to
>    keep 10% of the 30GB images seperately, and then use tar to unpack and
>    measure. But the tests so far are very negative for BSD (10 minutes
>    unpacking on Linux with ext3 against 26 minutes under FreeBSD 6 with
>    UFS2. I'm therefore looking for benchmark ideas in this category (so not
>    "install postgres and shove in the following selects"), which are
>    friendly to BSD and unfriendly to Linux. There has to be something?!
>    Please mail your hints to me!''
> 
> Given the last round of benchmarks and they improvements that were made to 
> NetBSD after them, this sounds very interesting. Ideas? What is it that 
> NetBSD can do better than Linux (and FreeBSD :-).

I also measured unpacking with tar (in my case, it was pkgsrc.tar.gz).

I found that it is helpful to:
- raise the kern.maxvnodes sysctl (probably to the number of files going
to be created by tar)

- do it on LFS instead of FFS

Probably it would also help building kernel with options UFS_DIRHASH (but
I don't know if it is compatible with LFS and FreeBSD probably already has
it by default). Also using UFS1 instead of UFS2 (if you don't want to use
LFS) might help.

Bye	Pavel