> Right ! I am using Linux. Could you tell me which system is the best to r=
un=20
> Bro?I don't know which is the best. Operationally, we're running it on
FreeBSD here, but I am doing some developing on Linux as well. I
would guess that there isn't a big difference between the two, but
I've never compared them. If anyone has some experiences in this
respect, I would really like to hear them.
I have been poking at this very question in relation to running argus
on Gig links. The fastest Argus installation I'm aware of (~ 400 megs per
second) is running Linux RedHat7.3 (as am I about to start doing). I have been
running FreeBSD for many years, however as part of Gig testing I have a pair
of test bed machines with dual 1.6 Gig Athlon CPUs and SysKonnect Gig cards
(two in each of two boxes). The boxes dual boot FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE and
RedHat 7.3. FreeBSD doesn't appear to be able to support dual athlons (one
box works fine the other crashes, it is believed due to an athlon bug that
Linux has a fix for and FreeBSD doesn't). Running FreeBSD single CPU, netperf
looks to take about %50 of one CPU. On Linux netperf looks to take close to
%100 of one CPU (leaving me all of the other for processing however). The
main problem I have found (and which I believe is showing up as spotty
throughput by packet size in netperf) is that FreeBSD loses packets (around
1000, in 10 million) on a spray ping on a crossover cable between boxes.
RedHat doesn't (loss is both 0% and packets received = packets sent). That
would appear to indicate a problem in either interrupt processing or the
SysKonnect drivers on FreeBSD. The more efficient CPU would of course favor
FreeBSD if the problems could be resolved.
Of course other configurations may vary 
Peter Van Epp / Operations and Technical Support
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada