Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?

[Dmitri Nikulin]

On 4/18/06, Petr Janda <elekktretterr at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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