Re: Still Considering Debian - But Stuck!
RH9 support NTPL, which might explain your problem.
could you also have a look at this post.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=38138
It is a hot discussion about why Java is slower on Linux than on
Windows, slower on Gentoo than on RH9, whether NTPL would help boost
the performance.
regards,
Ben
On Monday 02 February 2004 6:24 pm, Fred Whipple wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> A while back I asked for some feedback and got a very rich set of
> info from folks about Debian used in a stable ISP environment as
> compared to other OS's and distributions. All the info was very
> helpful and helped us further solidify our desire (though not yet
> decision) to make Debian our platform as we move forward.
>
> We've run into a couple rather HUGE issues, though, that I'd like
> to get further feedback on. Not that I couldn't figure it all out
> for myself, but nothing beats someone else's experience when it
> comes to saving me the time and heartache ;-) Just about everyone
> warned me that the stable Debian distribution would be old and well
> tested/maintained, but I'm not sure I was prepared for just HOW
> old...
>
> Our company uses Java --- a LOT of Java. We therefore use a lot of
> threads, and a lot of threads. And a whole mess of threads, too.
> Under Red Hat 7.3, we found that when the system had a total of
> say, 10,000 PID's given out (nearly all of them to threads) the
> system would become very unstable. When we moved to Red Hat 9 for
> the affected systems, which includes the new 0(1) scheduler, and
> either a different kind of thread support in either the kernel or
> GlibC, this problem went away. I'm honestly not sure who is
> responsible for the way threads are handled, and I suspect it's not
> exclusively the kernel, but under RH9 each JVM (or any app with
> threads) gets a single PID as normal and all very strange behavior
> that we saw under RH7.3 disappears.
>
> I see that Debian 3.0r2 includes a nicely aged (like fine cheese)
> Linux 2.2 kernel. While I'm certain the aging process only makes
> its flavour stronger and more delectable, I'm afraid it's going to
> choke at the thought of 10,000 threads. Say nothing of 20,000.
> Now I imagine it's not so difficult to simply compile a recent 2.4
> (2.5?) kernel and go from there. Is this fair? Or would you
> suppose that the current stable Debian is too old in other areas to
> properly handle kernel 2.4?
>
> Even if I replace the kernel, I'm concerned that there's more
> involved with the more efficient handling of threads from RH 7.3 to
> RH 9 than just a kernel change -- I have to think there was a
> significant rework of some libraries that made threads more
> efficient under RH9 as well. Would anyone be able to identify
> exactly what that re-working was, and conjecture if they think it
> can be done under 3.0r2? For that matter, would I at that point be
> running so much new technology that I may as well be running an
> unstable distribution of Debian?
>
> Finally, while I'm messing around with the kernel, I'd have to
> include support for ext3fs. In our environment, journaling is not
> an option, it's a base requirement. Of course replacing the kernel
> would pretty much give me kernel-level support for it. From that
> point, how complicated is it to get the rest of the tools to play
> nicely with ext3fs? I'd imagine that a large set of tools would
> need to be replaced, including e2fsck, mount, umount, etc.
>
> Thanks once again for all the info so far!
>
> -Fred Whipple
--
Dr. Ben Guofu Wu
Software Engineer
Icom Innovation
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