On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 01:20:49PM +0100, Robert Watson wrote: > >I know FreeBSD 5 was a strange exception in the relase scheduling and > >that a lot has been learned from it for the future and I'm certainly not > >unthankful for all the work that's done, but I'd like a clear answer on > >what to do now in regard to taking FreeBSD 5 into 'real' production...
[snip] > In terms of advice: > > If you have a "product" due out more than 3 months from now, I think 6.x > is the obvious way to go: you want to be ahead of the curve so that you > can have the foundation for your product in sync with the FreeBSD > production release cycle, and avoid jumping major releases early in the > product life cycle. 6.x has significant performance and stability > improvements -- performance especially in the area of file system > performance on SMP, preemption, network stack, and memory management, and > stability especially in the area of tty support. By "product", I mean a > range of things: the OS foundation of an embedded product such as a > firewall or storage appliance, or deployment of an internal product, such > as a virtual server product at an ISP. [snip] Robert, thanks again for your clear and straight answer. :-) We fall in the Yahoo-like category of FreeBSD users (in more than one way) and have been testing a bit with 6.x, just not as heavy as with 5.x. Since I've already experienced the easy upgrade path before (the way back to 5.x has been a bit more hairy btw.), it will be easy enough for me to upgrade some servers to 6.x and start testing that, which is excatly what I will do. Because my current 5.x machines have to run with INVARIANTS to be in production for more than a few seconds, the performance will no doubt be better anyway. I'll let the debug code enabled on most machines for now anyhow to possibly provide more useful bug reports. :-) Thanks again, your answer was of great value to me. Marc
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