On 4/18/06, Petr Janda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We have a p3 2x1133mh (i think) box not used and i was thinking about setting > it up as as a mailfilter gateway. The question is, is DragonFly's SMP > production ready and the whole system suitable for mission critical > applications? I'd like to hear what Matt and other devs and users think. > > Or should I go with FreeBSD?
In my limited experience and watching mailing lists / bug reports (and running both systems in the past), DragonFly is miles ahead of FreeBSD in cleanliness and stability, but still has a non-zero amount of bugs (which is entirely reasonable for any system, especially considering the revolutionary development involved). I adhere to NetBSD which has pretty much never failed me - though its SMP is primitive, it's stable, and the system itself performs very well overall. It even includes Postfix in the base package :) High kernel parallelism is nice, but you probably won't notice on a mail filter gateway. I'd run NetBSD. It sometimes hurts on interactive sessions, even on my dual-core, where the kernel is working on a long blocking code path (e.g. sync'ing large buffers during a file copy) but I'm not even sure DragonFly's parallelism is at the stage where such things don't happen - last I heard almost all drivers are still giant-locked, including the ones with potentially high latency like disks (however, maybe preemption is still in place - it sure isn't in NetBSD). -- Dmitri Nikulin
