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Old 05-29-2002, 11:30 AM  
posh rat in hell
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Join Date: May 2002
Location: New York City
Posts: 403
DynaSpain.
FreeBSD 4.x has what's known as a "Giant Lock" in kernel operations, meaning that only one kernel operation can happen at any given time, and *nothing* else can happen while that is happening. If you have very computation intensive operations, eg: multithreaded video editing, ok, but anything that is just simple I/O, like web serving, and in many cases database serving, all that is happening is syscall after syscall, with not too much processing, and every syscall is a kernel operation, so the 2nd cpu spends more time "Spinning the lock" than anything else.

Linux is a lot better, but still not "good".

FreeBSD 5.x was supposed to correct all of this, but with all of the core quitting, I doubt that will still happen in any reasonable quality.
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