Re: NetBSD 2 vs the rest with MySQL

I think he invalidated himself when he said:
"The other kernel only included the i686 definition, making it specific
to Pentium III processors or higher."

I can only assume that this is the kind of thing Hubert was talking
about when his blog mentioned "Aaah, the joy of people who have no idea
of what they're writing about still being bold enough to write about
things they have no idea about."

NetBSD's performance is anomalous, since I have never found anywhere any
evidence that it is measurably slower than Linux: in fact on some of my
machines it runs circles around it. MySQL is a horrible benchmark
platform since it is highly Linux-centric. It's not even good software.
Postgres could have given a more balanced result.

I threw www/apache2 + lang/php5 + databases/mysql4-server +
databases/php-mysql onto a NetBSD 3.0-beta machine to run Invision Power
Boards (not my idea, just my server). The machine also does a thorough
pf and IPSec setup, and is an NFS server. It happens to be a P3 1Ghz
laptop. Everyone agrees it's blazing fast. Whatever "poor performance"
NetBSD has in this kind of setup must be restricted to their tests. Out
of curiosity: did the investigation into increasing (quadrupling..)
performance for the (IIRC) 10M Rows benchmark actually include testing
Linux on the same machine and seeing if the performance difference was
just as the public benchmark showed? I have a lot of trouble believing
the findings without evidence from the other side. But I admit my time
spent browsing the mailing list archives isn't that extensive.

Worse shame is that benchmarks like this are often taken as gospel and
used to judge the entire merits of an operating system. People don't
seem to care about quality, security, stability, or indeed anything you
can't measure with a few lines of someone's language of choice. I have
heard people say "Why would I use BSD for a server? Linux 2.6 is O(1)
everywhere!", even though the kinds of loads the would deal with would
never emerge into the zone where Linux' O(1) becomes faster than an O(n)
with a lower starting point (which is often the case). So not only are
they losing micro performane (and macro: has anyone here actually tried
RUNNING a real server on Linux? Nightmare) but they are throwing away
quality assurance and security. Their loss, but it's hard to deny that
public opinion also sways donors /and/ developers, possibly deducting
from the foundation's available resources. A little bad PR is all it takes.

It's good that on the other hand that NetBSD is gaining recognition as a
competitor for FreeBSD's vaunted performance titles, but the real
corporate- and government-recognition giant is Linux. You know what I
heard on Slashdot? That some people are condemning NetBSD for moving to
replace Linux, for instance, implementing PAM (because, you know, only
Linux has PAM, and there are no real uses for it. Right?), having a
corporate-friendly logo, new numbering scheme, and so on. I only hope
potential future developers don't see it the same way. Even if it is so,
good, it's high time Linux' most popular advantage (basically, that it's
well known) got some real competition too.

Wow, long rant.

-Dmitri Nikulin