View Single Post
  #7   (View Single Post)  
Old 23rd January 2013
ocicat ocicat is offline
Administrator
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 3,318
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by pawaan View Post
...I hope you'll expand a bit this part:
Quote:
Operating system design choices don't typically enter the picture until gigabit NIC's are involved.
For the most part, much of the development of the *BSD family is done on desktop-quality hardware. Here, network throughput is mostly limited by the efficiency of the hardware/driver combination. In general, the quality of the network stacks are sufficient to handle the network loads placed upon them. Much of the differences seen at the enterprise level (large volumes of traffic...) are due to the fact that developers do not have access to such expensive equipment.

It should also be understood that tweaking/optimizing the network stack as implemented by the kernel is a much harder problem to solve. In comparison, writing driver code is more straight-forward. Not that either is simple, but the range of problems needing to be addressed by the kernel is far more broad.
Reply With Quote