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This is bullshit

julesh may well be right, wrong, or somewhere to the middle, left, or right of that. Civility helps others accept a point of view. My old-timer would tell me to, "wash your mouth out son".

The benchmark alluded to by julesh at (http://www.mindcraft.com/perfreports/nas/nas40-audit.html is for the Netscape Application Server. Nothing about PHP and Java there.

Here is a objective article referring to a presentation given by no less than a Director of Web Technologies at Sun, the Java bods. There is no bias for Java or PHP:
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/industry-news/php-vs-java-vs-ruby-000887.php/

...The reality is that there are a great number of ways to hone-in on the language or framework choice for a web application.
...the proponents of Java, PHP and Ruby are lighting the Internet aflame in defense of their platform of choice and at the same time nay-saying their fellow players. While very entertaining and sometimes educational to follow, not much is going to be gained from this bickering.
...The beauty of what we have today is that there ARE a great many choices out there, much more-so than even a few years ago.

Check out this presentation instead of the many spurious articles on the Internet and make the choice best suited for the application. There is no outright "king of the hill" any more. No sense in using Java when PHP is better and vice-versa.

While others flame, those who really know technology create the Java and PHP systems the flamers cannot.

Depending on the application, PHP can handle several hundred transactions per second, on *one* machine. It is common knowledge that Java requires far more resources to achieve a typical transaction rate, than PHP.[citation needed]

This is just bullshit. A Java-based server will typically require a fairly constant 64MB more RAM than an equivalent PHP server, but other than this the Java system will outperform PHP in every sense. If the content generation is even remotely complex, Java can be up to 100 faster, which translates to 100 times higher transaction rate.

Sure, PHP can handle several hundred transactions per second, if your script is <?php echo "hello world"; ?>. This benchmark of a non-trivial e-commerce application shows that Java can easily handle 500 requests per second on a small 2000-era 4-cpu cluster. A modern quad-core server should be handling at least 20 times that rate, absent any improvements in Java architecture since then (and there have been many; this test was run on Java 1.1, which was hideously slow compared to modern Java versions), and ignoring the performance improvement from not having to load balance requests at the front end or access the database server across the network.

As others have suggested, you may already be in over your head. But even to pick a consultant, you need to have a rough idea of the options and their cost/benefit trade-offs. The large vendors: IBM, Sun, Microsoft etc and some second-tier vendors such as Netscape and BEA have overviews of the application and architecture of their products on their respective web sites...that will cost you a day of reading and give you a headache from reading conflicting claims of superiority BUT, you will know the jargon and the current technology. Reading a book or two would't hurt but they tend not to be completely up to date. Also, look up SOA...the buzzword du jour in buiding web-delivered business services. If you have not googled already, you really ought. My first hit was a comparison of the performance of a dozen web servers with clear graphics and concise info on suggested benchmarking techniques.
In addition to hardware [do I need RAID? etc], and OS and web server infrastructure issues, don't forget you implentation language choice...what pool of programming skills will be available to write the code? for instance, here is how Perl stacks up but you have many choices these days.
And above all never forget "SH*T HAPPENS": how and how often and what are you backing up in case of crashes, fires etc.

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

No it's MindCraft you moron.

Either MS has something brewing, or they're incredibly stupid. The message sounds like something out of a Dilbert book.

Mindcraft Study. They were caught red-handed once and I don't see why they would not try again. In fact:

"The Red Hat participants left before Mindcraft completed the Phase 3 tests for Windows NT Server in order to make a flight home. PC Week did oversee these tests."

Since Red Hat isn't around, NT4 Server results can be bumped up a little bit, while keeping Red Hat's results constant to show they match with Red Hat's official results. That's one situation. If a 'reputable' company like Mindcraft can be made to bias, why not a small magazine like PC Week? Of course nobody can say for sure, but I think there's something fishy, as with anything involving Microsoft. To end:

"The information in this publication is subject to change without notice."

Actually you're both sort of right.

He's talking about the second Mindcraft test in which Microsoft and RedHat both tuned their respective setups and PCWeek supervised. It was a fair test.

You appear to be talking about the first Mindcraft test, which was completely flawed and worthless.

In an interview in the December 2000 issue of Linux Magazine, Linus Torvalds said that he had trouble believing the results of the second test for a little while before he realized that it was an opportunity to improve Linux.

Actually you're both sort of right.

He's talking about the second Mindcraft test in which Microsoft and RedHat both tuned their respective setups and PCWeek supervised. It was a fair test.

You appear to be talking about the first Mindcraft test, which was completely flawed and worthless.

In an interview in the December 2000 issue of Linux Magazine, Linus Torvalds said that he had trouble believing the results of the second test for a little while before he realized that it was an opportunity to improve Linux.

Andrew

and that's only on the application level. I have been hearing for over a year (1.2 release?) that servlets perform much better than cgi. Here's a couple links to evaluated benchmarks. Note the servlet link is from sun, so keep that in mind.
java and servlets

That must be one really fast vm!

-----
My karma is still less than my age.

In the second Mindcraft benchmark I thought that Redhat was invited to configure the Redhat machine. Here is the press release from Mindcraft on it. I realize the press release is biased. Mindcraft felt that this would show that if the machine was configured poorly it wasn't their fault. Now if Redhat can't configure their own box I don't think anyone other than Redhat is to blame. According to this page even Linus had his hand in providing tweaks in the open benchmark.

I really think that the Mindcraft benchmark gave us Linux folks a big poke in the behind to fix some things. If anything, the more recent studies that come more in the favor of Linux show that the Linux community has taken the Mindcraft benchmark seriously. A lot of work has gone into making sure that Linux doesn't look that bad in a similar benchmark again.

In the second Mindcraft benchmark I thought that Redhat was invited to configure the Redhat machine. Here is the press release from Mindcraft on it. I realize the press release is biased. Mindcraft felt that this would show that if the machine was configured poorly it wasn't their fault. Now if Redhat can't configure their own box I don't think anyone other than Redhat is to blame. According to this page even Linus had his hand in providing tweaks in the open benchmark.

I really think that the Mindcraft benchmark gave us Linux folks a big poke in the behind to fix some things. If anything, the more recent studies that come more in the favor of Linux show that the Linux community has taken the Mindcraft benchmark seriously. A lot of work has gone into making sure that Linux doesn't look that bad in a similar benchmark again.

In the second Mindcraft benchmark I thought that Redhat was invited to configure the Redhat machine. Here is the press release from Mindcraft on it. I realize the press release is biased. Mindcraft felt that this would show that if the machine was configured poorly it wasn't their fault. Now if Redhat can't configure their own box I don't think anyone other than Redhat is to blame. According to this page even Linus had his hand in providing tweaks in the open benchmark.

I really think that the Mindcraft benchmark gave us Linux folks a big poke in the behind to fix some things. If anything, the more recent studies that come more in the favor of Linux show that the Linux community has taken the Mindcraft benchmark seriously. A lot of work has gone into making sure that Linux doesn't look that bad in a similar benchmark again.

I believe it all has a lot with what parents encourage in their children when they are very young.

Certainly. The problem is that much of society still has this sexist/romantic view that, when the going gets tough, the men come and save their "weaker" companions . . .

There have been studies (I personally hate studies, as well as benchmarks) that support the idea that females, in general, learn best in a classroom or other formal setting. The studies show that males, on the other hand, learn best by trial and error (reason we usually don't read the directions?).

If this were true, it would certainly help explain the discrepancy in the ratio of females to males. The computer industry in general needs people who can relate their lego building skills to solving Real World problems, and not just run to Ken when something more than the normal classroom situation comes about.

Think about how you first learned to program, use an operating system, or whatever. Chances are you didn't go out and get some stupid yellow covered book (most of the people here not talking about Beer, Grits, and Portman at least).

--

can anyone point me to a real-world application or website that actually uses Java? I mean properly, not just a tiny applet showing the time or something.

Off the top of my head, let me see Mail.com uses Java to serve its pages. Does Oracle's new Enterprise database count?

And from Sun's page of industry news, we have companies like RSA, Oracle, Netcom, SAAB, Delta Air etc. using Java in mission critical situations on a daily basis.
Posts like this make me wonder about who composes slashdot's readership. Because only script kiddies and so-called web developers (HTML and javascript kiddies) use Java as a web app language. Also no one in his right mind uses Java for GUI development if the application has any degree of complexity. But as a middleware development language it is practically untouchable. When it comes to speed of development, maintainability and expandability for business applications few things beat Java. Add a native GUI or web interface depending on your application and a rock solid app has been created.

PS: Myth dispel mode Oh yeah, by the way Java pages are faster or at the very least as fast as CGI, it has to do with being memory resident a la the VM as opposed to being read from disk. Here's a benchmark and a link or two.

This is about selecting the project that has improved the most. Selecting the entity that can make best use of the money and claiming their project has improved most is quite much like conducting a benchmark test after selecting which product will win.

Actually, they do mention the full hardware configuration at the bottom of the phase 1-2 part, and yes, its 4 NICs again...

2 problems with this. The first is that numbers are really meaningless. Database performance depends on many things. So Microsoft optimised SQL server to be *fast* under certain usage. However, will it have that speed when *you* get it on your server? You don't know until you try.

We have seen this with many benchmarks. The Mindcraft benchmarks are a stunning example. NT is faster ... under certain circumstances. c't showed that under other circumstances Linux is faster. What's the point? Benchmarks are relativily bogus, unless you've done them for your *own* setup. For instance, I'd be more willing to trust these benchmarks then Mindcrafts

Second is, he's right. People won't be using Oracle for low cost databases. That's not the purpose of Oracle. But they won't be going to Microsoft either. It'll be too expensive. There are much better low-cost database solutions. MySQL, PostgresSQL, and others.

Perhaps rather more interesting than these silly emails is Mindcraft's rebuttals to the reporting they received after the 1st "benchmark" tests.

Personally I'd be interested to see some rebuttals to these rebuttals ...

Regards, Ralph.

In the Mindcraft report comparing NT with Netware, price/performance appeared at the very top of the report in the executive summery. Likewise, in the comparison between NT and Solaris, Mindcraft begins with an executive summery going over the price/performance. In fact, a spot on Mindcraft web site will be dedicated to price/performance since it is such a critical measurement.

So, when it comes to comparing NT and Linux, where is the price/performance figures? The Linux report also has an executive summery like the last two comparisons that Mindcraft published. But the key issue of price/performance never apppears. It is missing from the executive summery and missing from the report complettely. The reason for this is very clear. While the NT and Netware comparison put NT Server 4.0 at a software cost of $4,949 while RedHat Linux 5.2 with a 3-incident support pack both direct from RedHat comes to $249. (By the way, the 3-incident support pack also provides support for Apache & Samba issues.) The end result is that NT Server 4.0 would have to outperform a Linux server by nearly *twenty* times to achieve a perferable price/performance measurement for NT Server. Even misconfigured to produce bad results, Linux continued to FAR under-cut NT Server 4.0 in the price/performance.

The Open Benchmark Invitation will also product even more damning price/performance comparisons. The reason is that single CPU systems will be included in the tests. The Mindcraft report was based on the Dell PowerEdge 6300. This system comes with a base cost of about $15,000. One you add the Mindcraft specs of 4 processors, 1MB cache, 4GB memory, a 10,000 RPM 9GB hard drive, eight 7,200 RPM 4GB hard drives, the Dell PowerEdge 6300 system has over a $35,000 price tag to it. But it isn't the PowerEdge 6300 that Dell pushes with RedHat pre-installed on. It is the PowerEdge 1300 with a base price of $3,000. Once you kick the specs on the PowerEdge 1300 to having 768MB and four 9GB drives (matching the Mindcraft 41GB storage on their four processor system), the price is still down at $8,000. Hence, four PowerEdge 1300's can be had at $32,000, over $3,000 below the MindCraft PowerEdge 6300 configuration. But, if four uni-processor systems can ourperform the price/performance of a quad-processor NT server 4.0, do you think that statistic will make it on Mindcraft's price/performance page?

... I didn't think so either.

It is too bad that Linux can not be configured to perform badly enough to provide Mindcraft with price/performance they can publish. It is too bad that Mindcraft can not be "unbias" when choosing what price/performance figures too publish.

In the Mindcraft report comparing NT with Netware, price/performance appeared at the very top of the report in the executive summery. Likewise, in the comparison between NT and Solaris, Mindcraft begins with an executive summery going over the price/performance. In fact, a spot on Mindcraft web site will be dedicated to price/performance since it is such a critical measurement.

So, when it comes to comparing NT and Linux, where is the price/performance figures? The Linux report also has an executive summery like the last two comparisons that Mindcraft published. But the key issue of price/performance never apppears. It is missing from the executive summery and missing from the report complettely. The reason for this is very clear. While the NT and Netware comparison put NT Server 4.0 at a software cost of $4,949 while RedHat Linux 5.2 with a 3-incident support pack both direct from RedHat comes to $249. (By the way, the 3-incident support pack also provides support for Apache & Samba issues.) The end result is that NT Server 4.0 would have to outperform a Linux server by nearly *twenty* times to achieve a perferable price/performance measurement for NT Server. Even misconfigured to produce bad results, Linux continued to FAR under-cut NT Server 4.0 in the price/performance.

The Open Benchmark Invitation will also product even more damning price/performance comparisons. The reason is that single CPU systems will be included in the tests. The Mindcraft report was based on the Dell PowerEdge 6300. This system comes with a base cost of about $15,000. One you add the Mindcraft specs of 4 processors, 1MB cache, 4GB memory, a 10,000 RPM 9GB hard drive, eight 7,200 RPM 4GB hard drives, the Dell PowerEdge 6300 system has over a $35,000 price tag to it. But it isn't the PowerEdge 6300 that Dell pushes with RedHat pre-installed on. It is the PowerEdge 1300 with a base price of $3,000. Once you kick the specs on the PowerEdge 1300 to having 768MB and four 9GB drives (matching the Mindcraft 41GB storage on their four processor system), the price is still down at $8,000. Hence, four PowerEdge 1300's can be had at $32,000, over $3,000 below the MindCraft PowerEdge 6300 configuration. But, if four uni-processor systems can ourperform the price/performance of a quad-processor NT server 4.0, do you think that statistic will make it on Mindcraft's price/performance page?

... I didn't think so either.

It is too bad that Linux can not be configured to perform badly enough to provide Mindcraft with price/performance they can publish. It is too bad that Mindcraft can not be "unbias" when choosing what price/performance figures too publish.

In the Mindcraft report comparing NT with Netware, price/performance appeared at the very top of the report in the executive summery. Likewise, in the comparison between NT and Solaris, Mindcraft begins with an executive summery going over the price/performance. In fact, a spot on Mindcraft web site will be dedicated to price/performance since it is such a critical measurement.

So, when it comes to comparing NT and Linux, where is the price/performance figures? The Linux report also has an executive summery like the last two comparisons that Mindcraft published. But the key issue of price/performance never apppears. It is missing from the executive summery and missing from the report complettely. The reason for this is very clear. While the NT and Netware comparison put NT Server 4.0 at a software cost of $4,949 while RedHat Linux 5.2 with a 3-incident support pack both direct from RedHat comes to $249. (By the way, the 3-incident support pack also provides support for Apache & Samba issues.) The end result is that NT Server 4.0 would have to outperform a Linux server by nearly *twenty* times to achieve a perferable price/performance measurement for NT Server. Even misconfigured to produce bad results, Linux continued to FAR under-cut NT Server 4.0 in the price/performance.

The Open Benchmark Invitation will also product even more damning price/performance comparisons. The reason is that single CPU systems will be included in the tests. The Mindcraft report was based on the Dell PowerEdge 6300. This system comes with a base cost of about $15,000. One you add the Mindcraft specs of 4 processors, 1MB cache, 4GB memory, a 10,000 RPM 9GB hard drive, eight 7,200 RPM 4GB hard drives, the Dell PowerEdge 6300 system has over a $35,000 price tag to it. But it isn't the PowerEdge 6300 that Dell pushes with RedHat pre-installed on. It is the PowerEdge 1300 with a base price of $3,000. Once you kick the specs on the PowerEdge 1300 to having 768MB and four 9GB drives (matching the Mindcraft 41GB storage on their four processor system), the price is still down at $8,000. Hence, four PowerEdge 1300's can be had at $32,000, over $3,000 below the MindCraft PowerEdge 6300 configuration. But, if four uni-processor systems can ourperform the price/performance of a quad-processor NT server 4.0, do you think that statistic will make it on Mindcraft's price/performance page?

... I didn't think so either.

It is too bad that Linux can not be configured to perform badly enough to provide Mindcraft with price/performance they can publish. It is too bad that Mindcraft can not be "unbias" when choosing what price/performance figures too publish.

On Mindcrafts Reports Page They say "our .. reports give you the peak performance of various systems"

Many things were pointed out here and elsewhere, that changes they made *reduced* the performance of the Linux setup

Microsoft addmitted, via Ian Hatton, that the "NT box was better tuned than the the Linux Box

So, here we have a report on performance, where is seems to be clear that the linux box was running nowhere near its performance peak, but Mindcraft by publishing this report are certifing that it was at "peak performanance"

If it can be clearly shown that they are certifing something that is false, could they be forced to retract the "certified" report?

Now, *That* would be nice PR

Perhaps ESR is referring to a different document than I think he is, but the results that mindcraft posted at http://www.mindcraft.com/whit epapers/nts4rhlinux.html do claim that Microsoft sponsored the tests.

www.mindcraft.com
www.netcraft.co.uk

In the Performance Testing section on their web page, second paragraph they say flat out:

"...we work with you to define test goals. Then we put together the necessary tools and do the testing. We report the results back to you in a form that satisfies the test goals."

Since they say Microsoft sponsored the test, we can replace "you" with "Microsoft." So they worked with MS to define the test goals (NT is 2 or more times better than Linux). Then they put together the tools to do that, hacking the registry and all to beef NT up, slowing Linux apache/samba servers. And finally, report the results back in a form that satisfies the test goals, lo and behold NT is 2-3 time faster than Linux. Such a surprise, right?

Novell reacts to Mindcraft Benchmarks of Novell 5 vs NT4.
http://www.novell.com/adv antage/nw5/nw5-mindcraftcheck.html

Mindcraft admits that Microsoft commissioned the original report.
http://www.mind craft.com/whitepapers/rebuttal-summary-nts4nw5file svr.html

Do we see a trend here?

If you check their main whitepapers page you will notice that they did two similar studies previously, one between Netware and NT and one between Solaris and NT. In both cases they compared the price/performance of the OSes involved. They didn't this time. Might I conclude that thay have a selective observation?

If their NT is such a great server, lets just all go take a peek at their site...maybe hitting reload 50 times or so...

Mindcraft



-lx

The white paper says:

We posted notices on various Linux and Apache newsgroups and received no relevant responses. Also, we searched the various Linux and Apache knowledge bases on the Web and found nothing that we could use to improve the performance we were observing.


Anybody see these? Somebody do a dejanews search.

Btw. Is is possible to do all the NIC tweaks they describe with the Intel 100 linux drivers?

According to t his Mindcraft Report, NT+IIS running with 256 MB was faster than your Linux+Apache running with 512 MB!

Your Linux 2.2 statistics:
Server connection rate: 684.13 connections/sec
Server thruput: 103.30 Mbit/sec

Mindcraft's NT4 statistics:
Server connection rate: 929 connectsion/sec @ 50 clients
Server thruput: 137.7 Mbit/sec @ 50 clients


Wanker: Were the Linux statistics you posted from your EEPro + 3c905 benchmark? The NT benchmark used two 100Base-TX network interfaces on the server. This might explain why the NT numbers look so good..?

One caveat: the NT benchmark was done with WebStone 2.0.1 and the Linux benchmark was done with WebStone 2.5b3.

What benchmark software do you recommend? I've punished the living s**t out of a linux box (dual proc, 512MB RAM) with webstone 2.5 and the 100BaseT NIC (EEPro) was the bottleneck for static pages. Funneling half the traffic through a 3c905 (not 905B) boosted throughput quite a bit.

Here are the results from the best run versus Apache (performance goes down with more clients...)

WEBSTONE 2.5b3 results:
Total number of clients: 200
Test time: 2 minutes
Server connection rate: 684.13 connections/sec
Server error rate: 0.00 err/sec
Server thruput: 103.30 Mbit/sec
Little's Load Factor: 198.46
Average response time: 0.290 sec
Error Level: 0.00 %
Average client thruput: 0.52 Mbit/sec
Sum of client response times: 23815.70 sec
Total number of pages read: 82096

Note that these were for the standard Webstone distribution for static file benchmarks. I have no dynamic results. I also don't have a complete benchmark disclosure ready-- this is just a quick test I ran a while back versus linux 2.2.0