Meet the Experts night

This is my favorite night of BrainShare. All the developers and other related geeks come out to mingle with us end users. The Technology Lag is a lot like MTE night in miniature, but you're not guaranteed to have the person who wrote it at the table to answer your questions. It is a lot of fun for the technically minded.

Among the things I learned:
  • The faces of the developers that have been working this LibC issue I've been fighting for most of the life of this blog.
  • Due to ReiserFS, SuSE actually runs eDirectory faster than NetWare.
  • The Server Consolidation Utility doesn't support linux-to-linux migrations yet, but that apparently was a very frequently requested feature this week. So the geeks will take this info back to their managers to Make It So.
  • You can use chocolate fountains for BBQ-sauce.
The one that really grabbed my attention was the second item. They had a rack of 8 opteron 8-proc (4 dual core) servers running a 100-million object eDirectory, and pumping 30,000 queries a second. Apparently CNN, which uses eDir to drive a lot of what they do, has a 64-million object eDir.

The thing that got me thinking hard was a chart they had of eDirectory performance for the various processors. The top performer was the 4x Operton, and it blew the nearest competition (4 Operton single-core) out of the water. The holder of the bottom performer was a tie between NetWare 6.5 SP4, and Solaris SPARC.

Yeah.

Linux now outperforms NetWare for eDirectory. The reasons are partly due to OS. ReiserFS has much less metadata to fiddle with, so is generally faster than NSS. Linux's multi-thread model is much more robust than NetWare, which also greatly improves performance in this area. The other area of improvement is the fact that SLES has been compiled with Opteron optimizations, which is quite visible when compared to the Intel-64 on SUSE test. NetWare will never be 64-bit, so it is crippled by itself right there.

And let me tell you, this has me thinking.

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