Heads Up: FreeBSD/AMD64 Dual Quad Cores & filePro (GOOD NEWS!)

[Walter Vaughan]

Feel the need for speed?

We have a dual quad core box that I'm experimenting with. I downloaded 
FreeBSD7-CURRENT AMD64 Friday, and have been beating on it since. Following a 
few tweeks from FreeBSD committer suggestions for PostgreSQL, I can say this box 
is insanely fast now.

I can also report that the version of filePro for FreeBSD (5.0.14) that we have 
it works *INSANELY* good with it.

OldBox (Dual Xeons with Hypertheading off)
======
FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE-p10 #0: Wed Oct 11 10:46:59 EDT 2006
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz (2392.29-MHz 686-class CPU)
(has RAID5  4 SATA at 200G)

TestBox (Dual Quad Cores)
=======
FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT #6: Mon May 21 13:56:15 EDT 2007
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5335  @ 2.00GHz (2004.98-MHz K8-class CPU)
(has RAID10  4 SATA at 500G)

So it's not exactly apples. The newer box has slower CPU/better bus, newer box 
running 64bitOS vs 32bitOS. New box has all the tweaks for running PostgreSQL 
(using SCHED_ULE vs. SCHED_4BSD for example). And RAID5 vs RAID10 is kinda unfair.

However this is eye opening

i386 FreeBSD6.1 running fairly complex report
=============================================
15.906u 32.384s 0:48.51 99.5%   936+1064k 0+53io 0pf+0w

AMD64 FreeBSD7-CURRENT running same report
=============================================
10.449u 17.094s 0:27.55 99.9%   994+1123k 0+28io 0pf+0w

That's almost twice as fast, all the while dealing with running a 32bit app in a 
64bit OS, running 4.* compatibility layer, and a slower CPU!

I don't have timings for this same report on SCO5, but I seem to remember that 
same report took almost an hour (it seemed) to run on a PP200 box with SCSI 
drives, and when we ran it on our FreeBSD box it felt like it took just seconds.

***
So what this means is that while filePro is not certified AFAIK to run on 
AMD64/FreeBSD7, however the chance of sucess is pretty good, and gets a "Works 
for Me". I've had no problems with runmenu, rcabe, etc...

--
Walter

P.S. Here's the hardware link
http://cgi.ebay.com/Quad-Core-Xeon-2-x-5335-2-0GHz-Pedestal-4GB-4-x500GB_W0QQitemZ170076989487QQihZ007QQcategoryZ1484QQcmdZViewItemech