Slashdot Mirror
Linux vs. NT Reliability
buckrogers writes "Bloor Research has finished a year long study that shows that Linux is more reliable than Windows. In the study Linux failed once for four hours because of disk drive issues while Windows failed 68 times for "hardware problems (disk), memory (26 times), file management (8 times), and a number of odd problems (33 times)" for a total of 65 hours. I like the category "odd problems." "
No, the story wasn't ridiculous. The original post and yours both have it wrong. Read it for yourself, it says that of the 63,000 items in the list, 20,000+ (IIRC) were what we would consider bugs, mostly long-forgotten issues, etc., in other words, the result of sloppy programming and project management. The story stated that those list items that weren't bugs were requests for improvements and other feedback items.
Face it, when you make big promises, can't deliver, have to dump a number of promised features because they're impossibly broken, then still deliver late, you're Microsoft.
slashdot broke my sig
"This is the proof we have been looking for! Escher is alive and well, and living in a bit-bucket at MIT."
News of the discovery quickly spread, but faied to get passed the infinite waterfall or the perpetual stairs.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IIS runs as a service under NT4.
On those occasions that it refuses to shut down (say when I've some new code and one of my ISAPI threads won't terminate), I always found attaching the debugger and killing it in that worked!
If you had to reboot NT more than 68 times, you're simply an incompetent moron.
That's why I use Linux. It avoids emberassment and allows me to be productive. No reboots. No lost data. No reinstalls. No excuses.
... and that's not a joke. Each time it caused much hilarity at work, but eventually we got tired of the fun and just reformatted all the "company standard O/S's" into Linux, and we've never looked back since.
Apart from NT, I've never known any other system to crash while in its idle loop.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Look, you have to change your frame of reference. I see everyone doing cost/benefit analyses, uptime/reboot ratios, etc. for NT4. Why? Windows 2000 is very loosely based on the NT4 codebase. I mean, hell, they actually introduced another 65,000 bugs, so you know that there's a lot of new stuff in there. To be honest, I've found it quite stable, and I'm using Build 2072, which is 100+ builds from the last release candidate. There's probably 130,000 bugs in that version, yet it hasn't crashed for me once. Neither has Linux. In other words, I've found them to be equally stable. Windows and Linux. How's that for strange?
I'm not saying that Win2K is as stable as Sun, and probably not even as stable as Linux in general, but you shouldn't write it off so quickly. I mean that in two ways: first, if you're looking for a good, easy to use server, give 2000 a try, and also, for the rest of us, we need to beware of the threat that Windows 2000 poses. A lot of the shortcomings which inveterate Linux advocates use as cannon fodder aren't there anymore. I've always used Linux because I believe in open standards and Open Source, and it would be a shame to see Windows 2000 gain ground, what with Microsoft's usage of exactly the opposite.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
>But to make it a good game...we'd have to agree on something that actually beats M$.
You mean, something that M$ beats?
If so, how about the frustrated sysadmin, who has been trying to keep the NT box from going down for last 6 days?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I don't usually pull this "moderator baiting" crap, but this comment deserves attention. Drix is right on the money, and in fact maybe a little more than s/he realizes. We're competing with NT when the real competition with Linux is Solaris and Windows 2000. If we want to produce a better OS than Microsoft, we need to produce a better OS than Windows 2000, not a better os than Windows NT or Windows 95.
Finding God in a Dog
NT's alleged scalability advantages are irrelevant to many businesses. Almost all of the NT boxes that I have seen are standard single or dual processor systems. 4/8 processor systems are very expensive.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I don't have a link handy, but a month or two ago InfoWorld (print) published a pie chart showing the causes for NT failures incident.
The interesting thing was that "Internal NT problem" was just as likely to cause a failure as "Hardware/Drivers"
The *more* interesting thing is that the data was from Microsoft. (I really wish I had a link handy!)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This is the source of most crashes.
Not on any of the (hundreds) of NT boxes I've had the pleasure to run. 99% of the BSODS are NTFS.SYS or the SCSI or NIC driver, or a memory parity error. Of course, ususally the box just goes to shit without BSODding and needs to be rebooted, but that's usually a background service problem with nothing to do with the GUI.
I have to think that you've swollowed a line by saying this -- Unix users think that GUI-in-the-kernel is bad (OK, maybe that's true). But then you jump to the "logical" conclusion that that is why NT is not-so-stable. Sorry, the evidence doesn't back you up.
{I've only seen NT Server crash once on the video driver -- and the box stayed up. It was NT3.51 with the user mode GUI, of course. }
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually, you're right. Many of the Windows NT problems are related to application issues. (Of course, some would see this as an inherent weakness of the OS; depending on the circumstance, that may be a deciding factor.)
I was recently at a Microsoft Partners function that was attended by three Windows 2000 developers. One of them discussed specifically the question of why Windows/IIS web servers needed to be rebooted so often. Here's (approximately) what he said: "We found that they weren't always rebooting because they needed to, but because they wanted it to happen under their control, not when the machine decided it was needed. When we examined the problems, we found most of them were within IIS itself, relating to locked files and non-terminating scripts. Under Windows 2000, IIS runs as a service that you can stop and start by itself without rebooting the OS, and you can schedule it to happen when you want."
So, in essence, they worked around the problem by providing a more robust solution. Now you can schedule your web services to automatically shut down and restart themselves, without a time-consuming hardware reboot.
I can say from using both W2K Professional (beta) and Server (gold) that it's far more robust than Windows NT 4.0. You could always achieve good reliability with NT by carefully limiting your choice of hardware and running only software that was needed, but that's no longer going to be as necessary. I still have my beefs with Microsoft, but reliability isn't going to be nearly as high on the list as it used to.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Comparing Linux to NT isn't quite as fair as comparing NT to 98 or Linux 2.2.3 to 1.3.2. I mean they are completely different OS structures and are both programmed in different ways. They're both called to perform the same task but their differences make them hard to actually compare. With Linux you can customize the kernel to fit your hardware exactly, NT has to be run on the hardware right out of the box. If you compared NT to 98 it would kick its ass, same with comparing an older Linux kernel with the newest ones.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You need to get over the hump; bro. A lot of your problem is probably learning where the docs are (they're there a plenty, just not in an expensively bound, nicely printed manual). You've also got to expect to pay some dues and learning how a different system works.
I'm in the position of the first poster, but not quite as disheartened (yet). While your response is meant to be encouraging (and it is), it would be even more cheering if it was informative. Eg. the FM is 'right here'. That you couldn't point to a location in your response is a concise illustration of the problem itself.
Anyway, I'm confident that the passage of time and a few million eyballs and few thousand hands documenting the eyeball travails will alleviate the situation. It's just that "instant gratification" is sufficiently engrained in me that I don't want to wait. {smiles}
-matt
You obviously missed yesterday's story about a Microsoft memo outlining 65,000 bugs in Windows 2000.
My journal has hot
> I think this is prety much what most people would expect from WinNT 4.
Gee. And it only seems like yesterday that we were hearing how NT4 was the best thing since sliced bread.
> It doesnt have a chance against Linux - any distribution.
So. Now that W63K is (almost) out, you don't feel obligated to believe the Mindcraft benchmarks anymore?
> Windows 2000, however, is quite a different story.
Different bugs, but same old story.
> I'd be very interested to see a similar test performed between Windows 2000 and maybe Debian.
We eagerly await it as well.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Okay. I use both NT & Linux as servers. Have for many years. And here is my offered Expert opinion.
Regardless of whatever 'studies', or nit-picking.....
THe big problem is... NT likes to crash when you update software. When you try something new. It wants you to reboot all the time. This may seem normal to NT admins, but really... my VA Server has been rebooted ONCE in the last year, and that's because we had a 24 hour power outage. There is absolutely NO reason to reboot it, unless you are doing hardware modification, or absolutely need to update a driver (which amounts to hardware...) This is the single biggest reason it makes a good server. You can run multiple diferent server applications on it, and work on one without risking the others. In NT, this practice is suicide.
I read a statement that the attackers were obviously knowledgeable about both Unix and networks.
That suggests to me that the attackers were able to plant their zombie programs on Unix machines but not on NT ones.
I think that is nonsense. It's like something that Microsoft would post as a reason for buying NT in a FUD campaign.
There are plenty of programs like L0pht and BO 2000 that will turn your NT box into a zombie. The number of people that have had their Windows 9x machines compromised after putting them on a cable modem is legendary.
NT has various memory leaks, it has to be restarted or will eventually crash. It could be the apps that are causing it, but it is the apps that give NT all it's functionality so that's no excuse.
+&x
umm 16X is a bit more than luck. If you don't believe this test I have a quick excercise for you to do. Install a dual boot NT/Linux box, when one crashes switch to the other. At the end of the year tell me which one you used more.
+&x
I reboot all our NT machines at least once a week (52 times/yr). If you don't they'll take care of it themselves...
+&x
you can "assume" if you want, but you're the only one who believes it. The ONE and ONLY failure for linux was the HD, causeing a four hour downtime. If replacing a harddrive on a linux machine is roughly akin to replacing one on an NT machine..you rcan remove one crash and four hours from both results. So now, Linux was not down at all and NT was down for 61 hours, ie. Linux is infinitely more stable than NT.
We can't assume a damn thing, but it's nice to see a study (rather than a press release) that backs up what has been my real-life experience.
+&x
Maybe Windows just stresses out the hardware more and causes itself to crash because of that?
Count this be because of the difference between programming in a theoretical environment(i.e. Redmond) and programming in a real-world environment (i.e. the real world)?
Did ESR cover this in CaTB?
+&x
Agreed. Linux has replaced Windows for me on the server and the desktop. I'm quite happy. I have found everything I need in the Linux world (except for Starcraft!...). What the hell do I care what everyone else uses?
The only time I feel compelled to get into these arguments is with a boss that thinks Redmond is synonymous with Mt. Olympus. I don't usually work at places like that long.
Remember, one of the major "selling points" of SP3 (aside from the fact that it replaced *shudder* SP2) was that it rebooted "50% faster". :)
Which is actually very useful if you're using NT as a workstation, and you do environmentally conscious things like turning the machine off at night when no-one's using it...
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I've done similar apps using the technologies you mention. It should be better tha 90 minutes.
Have you been monkeying around "tuning" the ODBC network params? That one's bit me plenty of times on NT with Sybase (and various platforms with Oracle). Being a long time UNIX guy, I have the attitude that parameters are to be tweaked. Sometimes, with large commercial software systems you're best off not tweaking until everything is stable, and then very carefully.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
at the command line, getting crap like RTFM (when, in fact, there is no definitive M), and trying to configure ridiculously obfuscated network settings, I'm ready to go back to windows.
You need to get over the hump; bro. A lot of your problem is probably learning where the docs are (they're there a plenty, just not in an expensively bound, nicely printed manual). You've also got to expect to pay some dues and learning how a different system works. It's like learning a new (human) language -- some of its logical, but a lot of its arbitrary; it's important to realize that your native language is pretty arbitrary too. It takes a while until you start thinking in the new language. Until that point, you will seem dumber than you are in your native language.
That's what linux is missing, and may never have. In windows 9x, a few clicks and a reboot is all it takes to get a workstation on the network. It's basically the same with NT, just a little more technical, for control purposes. In linux, you have to ensure the the damned OS works with most of the hardware in your box, then play with text files all day until you think you've got it.
Don't mix up your learning curve with the cost of installation. When you get into more of a production mode, Linux installs are really much easier. For example, you are complaining about using text files, but what kind of configuration could be easier than copying the relevant files, which in 99% of the cases can be identical? If you are doing a lot of them, you can simply script the whole thing; which beats having to check every few seconds on whether the computer is waiting for your click. Of course, as you point out, the hardest thing is going to be supporting oddball hardware. All hardware manufacturers provide Windows drivers, but Linux drivers are provided by people who want the device to work under Linux. The upshot is that you're in trouble if you like to bottom fish for a completely different set of the cheapest components you can find on every new box you do. So, go with quality hardware, and try to standardize your boxes; or at least check beforehand to see if the ISA slot modem you're installing is supported.
but at least it has friendly support (you people could work on this one), copious amounts of software, and configures with just a few clicks of the mouse button
Well, I for one have found the free Linux support more friendly and responsive than commercial tech support I'm paying good $$ for. But, you have to remember it's free. This means putting your sweat equity into fixing your own problem first, and then taking the effort writing a clear and concise description of what you are trying to do and where you got stuck, with the minimum amount of bitching about how stupid Linux must be because you already know how to do this on Windows. In other words, make it easy and pleasant for someone to help you.
If you come to the table with a chip on your shoulder (as users of commercial support feel they are entitled to do), then you will get your rudeness shoved right back at you (you might not be aware that you are being rude, but ask anyone who's worked tech support).
So brush up on the charm. It used to be that computers were a haven for people too socially maladjusted to function anywhere else. No more!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
With 28,000 known (real) bugs before release and some unknown number of undiscovered bugs lurking in the software, how many do you think there really are?
My guess is that there are more than one undiscovered real bug for each known bug. Even that (conservative) guess would put the minimum number of real bugs right around the 64K number.
Realistically, however, there are likely to be far more than one unknown bug for each known one at this stage in W2K's life. But enough of my guesses. How would you estimate the number of real bugs likely to be lurking in W2K?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I submitted this as a Slashdot story about a year ago, alongside a different computer journal article from people that actually got fresh news, rather than dead meat.
Possibly why the story was rejected then was because Bloor Research could have said *ANYTHING* about Linux - you have to pay to read the report. Other institutions (VNU Labs, Ziff Davis) have produced just as important research, made it freely available through various media formats, and are probably as reputable, if not MORE reputable, than Bloor Research.
It seems Bloor Research (who heard of them before today) have got more promotion from simply doing ANY report on Linux, than they have created for themselves in the past. Yup, they're just jumping on that old bandwagon.
insignificant sig
NT - Literally, New Technology.
j.
Absit Invidia
I don't agree with that. Hardware problems are hardware problems. Chances are Linux got away with it cause Linux never bothered to use any advanced features of the hardware. For example, there are tonnes of IDE controllers and chipset drivers that come from various manufacturers for NT. Now, I'm not saying this is a software/driver problem, what I'm saying is that these drivers could for example do some special new fangled call to the hardware, that could cause the hardware to lock up, get into an unstable state etc. Windows tends to be more 'bleeding' edge because of the huge hardware manufacturer support, while Linux most of the time runs vanilla chipset drivers. That's just one example, but i think it's a valid one.
Explain, what is a default kernel in linux "moron".
NT kernel is optimized all the time, we have ring0 drivers, vxds etc. We don't have a monolithic kernel you know. That's what this thread was about...not installing the right drivers. There's this amazing thing, we don't have to recompile the kernel to remove a feature!
NT has a very nice driver model. So like if a new device were to come along, the manufacturer could write a driver without any NT source. As an example (this is 2.0.x) I had to recompile with ipfw options to get ipmasq and ipfwadm to work. with win95 and an unmodified kernel, you can write NAT. Anyway....my point was not to say that Linux "can't" do these things, but was to say that just cause you don't have NT source doesn't mean you can't "optimize" the "kernel/drivers". I know Linux has kernel modules.
Um, so you're saying that Linux doesn't need a decent driver model and abstract because they can always get the source? Uh no. Manufacturers just want a nice DDK, read the docs, get some examples, and do it.
Not, how do you explain the thousands of drivers for NT?
Why don't you look at the DDK for once, much nicer than what linux has...which is take the code and if you can't do it you're a stupid idiot.
MS has been claiming unix is dead for more than 15 years, and they continue to try and convince people that they must make a choice between Linux/Unix and NT.
The real issue here is conectivity and interoperablility. When comparing OSs, look for one that "plays well with each other"(netBSD vs free BSD vs Redhat). micros~1 has spent millions and gone *way* out of their way, time and time again, to put barriers between unix and windows, then marketing the differance in the marketplace, asking users to "choose". This fucked-up aproach adds to the TCO (Total cost of ownership) of window~1
So, the short answer to the question is both operating systems have their place.
1)window~1: clueless newbies
2)unix: serious internetworking
The real question is which unix is best for me?
_________________________
What kind of crap hardware were they running? Not to necessarily defend NT, but it sounds like many of the problems could have been related to whatever hardware they picked.
--
Adding up 52 of these would certainly add a little more downtime.
Ignore Alien Orders