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Hotmail about to collapse under load
An AC submitted this interesting tidbit from those folks over at NetCraft. To quote from the page: "HotMail has commenced its much awaited migration to a Microsoft operating system.
Some Windows 2000 machines have recently been moved into the load balancing pool,
with currently between 90-95% of requests being served by the established
FreeBSD/Apache platform, and 5-10% from Windows 2000." This is not the first time MS are believed to have attempted this (but I'd appreciate hard evidence confirming that, instead of the more normal rumours and whispers).
Actually, I think this: "Hotmail does not condone or support the sending of junk e-mail (aka "spam") through our system" refers to using your hotmail account to *send* spam. I've tried complaining to their customer service accounts regarding this (before they added the "bulk mail" filtering) and got a back a response basically saying: "we didn't send it, complain to the senders."
It did seem to me that there was a point (maybe 18-24 months ago or so) at which Hotmail's user list was comprimised (either by leak or by guessing). I went from recieving practially no unsolicated spam at hotmail, to getting several a day. It became pretty much intolerable until they added the bulk mail filtering, which I think works admirably well.
As someone whose been using Hotmail since they first came out, I think it's a pretty good service. Not so long ago (even post-M$) you could call and TALK TO AN ACTUAL PERSON about problems with your account. The phone number was right on the homepage. (I suspect they have too many users for that now.) Until I can get a free account @andover.net, quit whining about HoTMaiL--they did it first, and they still do it pretty well.
I'm running a cron job that periodically profiles their server makeup. Currently, I'm getting 24-30% MS. It was about 4% a couple of days ago, so they are still working on it, and rather rapidly adding machines.
Though I don't work at IBM, and so could be full of horse-hockey here, it was my understanding that there is no such thing as "the people at IBM", except for SEC and tax reporting purposes. There's "the people at this bit of IBM", "the people at that bit of IBM", etc.
The real news in the Netcraft article, which no one seems to be mentioning, is that Linux now runs 30% of the WWW
AT THIS RATE, 200% OF THE WWW WILL BE RUNNING LINUX IN ONLY A FEW YEARS!
I'm not claiming that /. is the speediest site on the net, but i tried, and failed to clock a time > 1 second opening this edit window, and I'm 12 hops from /.
----------------------------
$ lynx -head -dump http://lc5.law5.hotmail.passport.com/cgi-bin/login
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 18:38:05 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
(...)
Slashdot doesn't have to be leaking in order for your e-mail address to become known. There's lots of other ways. perhaps hotmail is leaking, perhaps someone is sniffing traffic.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I doubt it's really faster - even if it is kernel level, it still compares to apache/mod_perl as far as speed is concerned. The fact that the webserver is part of the kernel might make it faster, but for CGI scripts an external application still has to be spawned. I doubt M$ has integrated a perl interpreter in their kernel. If they have they need a beating with a GPL license :)
Anyhow, does it really matter right now what they run? The key point is it'll be good to find out whether Win2K has any balls. If it has, well, I'll swallow my pride for a minute and say 'nice job M$' and if it fails, I'll just say 'typical' and go on with life.
There is no sig...
The S/390 doesn't "die" from a hardware failure. A Parallel Sysplex cluster of S/390 hardware provides 99.999 percent availability (five minutes of planned downtime per year). Hotmail can't even remember to pay its DNS fees once a year.
Each S/390 computer is designed so that a component that fails can be swapped out without disrupting the workload. On the G5 and G6 systems, each CPU has a dual instruction/execution unit (does Windows 2000 run on any hardware with _redundant_ central processor units?). The systems have spare RAM in case some fails, and they can dynamically reconfigure their I/O channels to cope with increased traffic or failure.
When a processor in a Sysplex Cluster fails, the machine it's in automatically activates another in the cluster to handle the task. When you submit form data with your message to Hotmail, and CPU on the Windows 2000 server will only execute instruction "42", where does your message go? As far as I can tell from the web info, all the S/390 machines have (at the least) dual redundant power supplies, and an uninterruptable power supply as an option. The disk drives can be swapped out on demand.
--
amen brother. /. is already biased purely by its content selection. we don't need more bias in the content itself.
sheesh.
Okay, there's MS, with this huge hotmail thing which draws lots of traffic. And that traffic is a free service, so they don't have to care if it goes down.
Great. They have one of the best testbeds in existence for stressing new technologies. Even if they swap out 20% of the current servers with something that fails miserably, they still have a working service. And since that 20% will be getting traffic that no company in their right mind would devote to win2k for a production service, they get great bugfix material, and service packs get better.
so i don't see this as anything but good. the quality of win2k will get better (although really, I've only had crashes due to a rotten video driver, and don't start the whole video/kernel debate, please), and the bsd/linux/anti-ms hooligans can berate ms when their "attempt to migrate to 2k" fails. capiche?
who cares anyway? you all get hotmail for free..
-o, mcse - 3.51
Actually, there was recently a /. article stating that MySQL's license had been changed to the GPL, so it's now free in both senses. (I think.)
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
There is Apache for win32 (though I'm not sure hotmail runs it - it's not so mature as on Unix). Most probably Netcraft launches two probes - for OS and for Webserver, and in this case theyt landed on different servers due to load balancing.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
We are slashdot of borg. Reason is futile. You will be moderated.
Of _course_ the title is just a pointless anti-MS jibe. You seem to be forgetting that this is the highest form of humour. Perhaps your implant needs adjusting.
We could have a discussion about the relative merits of the new technology in W2K vs the proven ability of the current system. We could have some people who have experience of running multi-node W2K based mail systems relate their experiences. We could even have some people from the Hotmail technical team post interesting messages about the migration, what tools they are using, and so on.
But, hey, this is a forum for Geeks, so we'll probably just have stupid I love x I hate y comments and some guy from a web design company saying how their new W2K web server crashed on the first day so obviously the Hotmail will never run on W2K.
Hey ho.
-----
As I understand it companies can pay hotmail (Microsoft) to spam their users internally. Hotmail does provide bulk mail filters to catch these things, but the majority of their users get the semi-targeted spam directly in their inbox.
--
Whose salesforce? If the Microsoft sales force becomes more productive due to the new name and they sell more copies of win2k, they could actually make this a true statement. It would be deceptive as all hell, though.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
...If they are going to have to increase the size of the load sharing pool. IOW, they have X *BSD boxes running the show right now. How many w2k boxes at what MHz will be needed?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
...a self-fulfilling prophecy?
/. effect alone might come close to "collapsing" hotmail.
The
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
I set up an address solely for anyone responding to my /. posts. I've never sent any mail from that address, but I've received spam on it. Ditto my address for Technocrat, which is different.
Some scum has the minimal smarts needed to scan weblogs for addresses. Ah, well, time for RBL/ORBS/whatever.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Actually it's free. Remember hotmail is owned by Microsoft. :)
Finally a voice of reason.
A task like this does take a great deal of work, as you point out.
I'm always amazed at the number of Linux zealots who throw reality to the wind, shove their head up their asses and believe a Rumormill article about a failed Exchange migration that happened only a month after Microsoft purchased Hotmail.
A pool of exclusively W2K servers will be able to service hotmail's clients, if not today, then with SP1 or SP2.
Microsoft wants to change servers badly and I can think of no reason why they wouldn't be able to make this work.
However, everyone knows that the migration is taking place for the sole reason that Microsoft, the owner of Hotmail, wants to get rid of non-Microsoft servers for the services it provides. Performance or cost are non-issues in this matter.
As a result, no lesson can be learned from the migration, except that W2K can actually be used to run something like Hotmail.
Of course, I'd love to see Microsoft's sales force quip that only if you are providing services to some 60 million customers you can rely on free software, but above that number one really should go with W2K.
-cjr
I ran this same thing about 20 times and got nothing but
<pre>
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
</pre>
Both against the url above, and www.hotmail.com directly. Maybe they took NT out of load balancing already? Or maybe they're using it for some specific functions such as serving part of the static content?
Maybe the
go grab the GNU sh-utils tarball from gnu.org. It'll compile on pretty much any Unix flavour.
...;done
Or, you can say
for i in {0,1,2}{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9};do
if you're running bash (or another shell that does curly-brace expansion).
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
> Remember that they have never been on trial for
> anything to do with customers, only rivals.
True, but the reason the things they do to their rivals is a problem is because consumers get screwed over, whoever's customer they are.
This doesn't mean that MS _is_ always evil on purpose, though. I think they are often just trying to make things easy for people who don't know anything, but they don't have a very good idea of exactly how stupid the average person is. (e.g. would they or wouldn't they want to know about x... Nah, lets not even bother making it possible for anyone using our software to find out about x, whether they want to or not.) Or something like that. I'm sure most of us have had the misfortune of discovering what I'm talking about. (I kind of got off on a tangent here, but I think MS does a lot of things without thinking to hard about the impact on other companies and on people. So there bad behaviour may be more due to recklessness than ill intent.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I would have used
:) Hopefully people who read this post will be one step closer to being shell wizards.
for i in $(seq 252);do foobar;done > foobar.log
to run foobar the same number of times you did. seq is in one of the GNU something-utils packages, almost certainly the shell-utils one. (i.e. it's probably already installed on most Linux boxes.)
Also notice that the redirection happens for the loop as a whole, which is interesting and useful sometimes.
There's no one right way to do most things, but my way takes less typing
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Here's a little program I whipped up (with some help from mud99 at #perlmonks) to check the load balancing.
/unix/i){
After 1000 attempts, I got the following results.
bash$ check.pl http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com
Percentage of unix boxes is 19.700000
bash$ check.pl http://www.hotmail.com
Percentage of apache boxes is 90.000000
Go ahead and try this at home. (Warning! Quick hack!)
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Written by Greg Flanders
# Usage check.pl http://host.to.check.com
require LWP::UserAgent;
my $ATTEMPTS = 1000;
my ($count, $ua, $request, $response, $p, $serv);
for (my $i=1; $irequest($request);
$serv = $response->headers->server;
if($serv =~
$count++;
}
}
printf("Percentage of apache boxes is %f\n", ($count / $ATTEMPTS) * 100);
Shoot. The code didn't copy correctly. Try this.
/unix/i){
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Written by Greg Flanders
# Usage check.pl http://host.to.check.com
require LWP::UserAgent;
use strict;
my $ATTEMPTS = 1000;
my ($count, $ua, $request, $response, $serv);
for (my $i=1; $i<=$ATTEMPTS; $i++) {
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$request = new HTTP::Request('HEAD', $ARGV[0]);
$response = $ua->request($request);
$serv = $response->headers->server;
if($serv =~
$count++;
}
}
printf("Percentage of apache boxes is %f\n", ($count / $ATTEMPTS) * 100);
" I wonder if they expect any benefits (besides marketing) from the "upgrade"? "
They're probably doing it for the same reasons that all the top automobile companies have racing programs: the best way to make sure you have a good product is to put it under the greatest amount of stress, with the whole world watching.
Like your .sig; I was going to use the same one (almost): this statement has no proof
Been reading math books recently?
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. I don't know how their load balancing stuff is working, but I guess that NT box fails 20% of the time and a FreeBSD box takes over. In any case, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you need to query www.hotmail.com if you want to find out what www.hotmail.com is running.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
no! from www.hotmail.com you get redirected to one of the servers. He scanned just one address, which is handled by mostly NT boxes.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Dumbass! You need to query www.hotmail.com. Looks like the address you are querying is an NT box, so it's not surprising that you're getting these results.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
If the snake eats tail-first (and sometimes captive-born do "by accident" because they're not as bright, it seems), the claws on the being-eaten animal tend to drag down the esophagus. Whereas, with head-first, the arms fold neatly against the body, the claws are thus no danger to the snake.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Yeah, I find that "Flamebait" flag a little odd too. You have 3 moderations for "interesting" (or was that "insightful"?) and one "flamebait".
Shouldn't the 3 moderations "win" for what a response is going to be tagged as?!
I suspect "Flamebait" was the last moderation applied and, voila, that's what it gets tagged with.
Man, what some folks will waste their karma on...
Moof!
"Actually, I've heard that the number of slashdotters is past a half million. "
Possibly, but I'm pretty sure that the chances of them all going to Slashdot, and then all deciding to hit Hotmail simultaneously, are pretty slim. From the way this site has been performing for me lately, it seems that if they all went to Slashdot simultaneously, they'd probably Slashdot Slashdot.
this is a bookmark i use to identify a webserver - should work with any JS capable browser. just click this link when you're on a page and it will get you the netcraft result ...
m /whats/?host='+top.location;
javascript:top.location='http://www.netcraft.co
Alright, well first off, let me say that my post sounded more inflammatory than I intended it to be. Thanks for being civil in your reply.
Yes, it could be due to the nature of the applications I run at work that I haven't had as bad a win2k experience as you. I primarily run VC++, various MS SQL Server and Oracle applications, in addition to the server, and the actual applications I develope for.
I don't know what to make of my memory "problems", since they don't seem to affect anything. I think it could just be a case of me checking at strange times of the day or something. There is just a period in time where my reported memory usage becomes 30 mb higher than it was previously, and nothing I do decreases it. Oh well, I accept it begrudgingly as windows lameness.
As for blue screens of death (in win2k), I have never seen one, nor do I know anybody who has admitted to seeing one, although I can definately imagine it happening, if ever, with printing since I've noticed very flakey operation for print operations (jobs disappearing, etc).
I didn't call you a liar, however since I don't know you, I merely wanted to raise the point that you may not be telling the truth since there is so much anti-ms fud going around. There are many "anecdotal" tales of win2k crashing and pooping all the time, but very little hard evidence. And also, I didn't mean to imply that you were blindly bashing anything, but just reading some other comments from this article, I had that on my mind. If you really are crashing that often, it might be a good idea to check your video drivers. I've had problems with video/scsi drivers a bit. When I tried win2k beta, I updated to some bad tnt2 drivers and it caused no end of trouble including serious freezes.
-Ryan
Oh, and by the way, I am definately not pro-microsoft by any means. I still hate them for, amoung other things, unleashing MFC upon the world.
You claim to have used win2k pro, yet you say it crashes once a week, or once every two weeks. How can this be the case? Either you have bad drivers (which are a problem under any OS), you are not telling the truth, or you are mistaken (or your hardware sux). I have never had an instance where I can't fire up task manager, kill an offending process, and return to normal operation. I have run win2k pro at work exclusively for over almost 4 months and it has never ever crashed once. Explorer has, on rare occasion, had little quirks, but it has righted itself, somehow. Also, I find it odd that as my uptime increases, so too does my memory usuage (it is usually fine up to about 2 weeks uptime).
Windows 2000 is a decent product. I still prefer FreeBSD on my own time, but it is a very reasonable platform to work on. I hate this attitude of bashing it blindly. For the record, I had a linux OS crash on me 3 times in my life (with stable 2.2 kernels), win2k never.
Why are you blamming the spam on slashdot? Did it ever occur to you that hotmail is probably leaking their users, not to mention they (use to anyway) have that stupid directory. Before I stopped using hotmail all together, I checked it once or twice a week. The messages I found most amusing where the ones that said something about "your mailbox if full." Yet the only stuff in there was porn ads and "your mailbox is full" messages. heh.
---
Statistical anomoly. Acceptable losses. Reboot and reinstall.
--- http://foo.ca
Uhhh...mysql isn't Free. (It's free-as-in-beer, but that isn't Free).
I must admit that my knowledge about LVS, or any clustering, is quite limited. But from what I just read on LinuxWorld , I ask: Do you think that a load-balancing system would be a factor in this case, given that Lynx was restarted for each connection? (Making persistant connections impossible.)
-Waldo
-------------------
I can guarantee you that there are a _lot_ more than 200 machines running Hotmail. Try multiple thousands.
How much would that cost?
Each of the machines runs Win2K Advanced Server at $3500 a pop without client licenses, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt and price it at $2000 bulk rate. 'Course, if you're one of the companies that signed up for Microsoft's many "www.howsuckupdidit.com" ad campaigns to tout the wonders of Win2K, I'm sure you got it for much, much less.
Even still, to license the number of Win2K machines Hotmail's using would be in the millions or tens of millions. Not to mention any hardware upgrades.
That doesn't look so good compared to FreeBSD's price.
W2K plays 3D shooters ("Tested": Unreal, Q3, QII, Half-Life, CounterStrike, FreeSpace, etc) faster and smoother than W98 *on the same hardware* (PII 350, 16MB Riva TNT, 128MB RAM, 10GB 7200 ATA66 disk - not big iron, by any means).
It seems to do better in both OpenGL and Direct3D modes - and the OpenGL is definitely better; a bunch of annoying artifacts in Half-Life (under OpenGL/W98SE) have gone away (decals not displaying correctly, etc). I run my games at 640x480x32, and they run nicely at default detail levels. Purely subjective, of course.
It also does better with lots of things running, and is generally kinder to the Win32 versions of XEmacs and ActivePerl.
W2K is not bad, not bad at all. Of course, I've souped mine up with Object Desktop from StarDock, so everything looks real purty - and ObjectZip and Control Centre give me some groovy stuff.
--
Peter
Once you're even slightly above the minimum requirements, the main thing you need is memory. 64MB doesn't cut the mustard for W2K - you need at least 128.
On my humble PC, it's quicker than 98 for interactive use (i.e. web browsing, wordprocessing, general footling about). But, as always, YMMV.
--
Peter
Fair enough, sort of...
Couldn't happen. I've heard from a reliable source (a friend that is an electrician)that the data center in which the Hotmail servers are kept physically has NO space left, the floors are filled. If they wanted to add more servers they would have to move them to another data center somewhere. (possible but not likely IMO). More realistically the machines are being replaced close to 1:1 or maybe better. (good time to upgrade hardware)
BTW I also havea friend who claims he recieved an email from Hotmail informing him that his cluster was being migrated to Win2K. I haven't heard anyone else say this but I do trust this guy.
It's a little more than that. :-) Hotmail has something like 200 backend db boxes alone. The front end I have heard is 1000+. Not small. But then Windows doesn't cost MS anything does it?
But remember with a huge site like this someone would probably site license the OS or get a "bulk" deal for a lot less than what most of us could get it for.
Well, if your mailing list was archived publically, then your address might have been picked up by spam-spiders or whatever.
I didn't make myself clear; I never got around to using the Hotmail account on the mailing list. It was never used for anything.
Jay (=
I've installed and used sendmail a few times and I swore never to do it again! It's most difficult to configure program in existence.
They can use postgresql. it's free and supposedly much better than mysql
Really? Take a look at the new folder on your account -- "Bulk Mail." Yep, full of spam.
Sorry, I do run Win 2K, but before I get slammed, I definitely run Linux and OpenBSD.
The NT stack definitely used some of the BSD code as a starting point - you only have to look at the way some of the things work, but it has been heavily Windozed to function, and not all that well as the underlying architecture is continually evolving.
No - Win 2K is not OpenBSD and seems much too fat to run the kinds of load that a service like Hotmail offers. Then there is the matter of IIS 5 versus Apache, it too is bigger and apparently much slower.
As far as overall reliability is concerned, I'm not running any high volume service, just a general purpose development system, but Win 2K does seem more reliable now than NT4 was.
That's their strength. Don't take this wrong, but Microsoft's strength isn't in innovation. It's in the fact that they relentlessly try over and over and over again until they get things right.
So, they tried moving hotmail to NT 4 a few years back. That failed. Now they're trying again with Win2000. That may or may not fail, we haven't seen yet. But even if it does, they'll try again until eventually, Hotmail WILL run on exclusively Microsoft products...
yahoo's not dumping BSD for the sake of dumping BSD. Google is the best (in my opinion and many other people's as well) search service. Yahoo wants to offer Google to their visitors, so they don't lose the hits to Google. And since Google runs on Linux that's what google.yahoo.com needs to use as well.
That's hardly a "loss" for BSD.
That's what I just said.
*cough*qmail*cough*
:)
nerdfarm.org
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
what people don't realize is that win2k/iis is faster for cgi than fbsd/apache due to the fact that iis is kernel level. Sorry but it's a reality and stability isn't that huge of a problem when you are using a farm.
remember that outage a little while ago...who here thinks that was a planned outage now?
I do.
Maybe for the last little while they have intentionally slowed down, or stopped service, just so that when they do bring in win2k servers, they can point at it and say..."remember how crappy hotmail used to be with that Unix crap...now look at it, fast and stable with Win2k" Everyone should use Win2K, its the greatest....yadda yadda yadda"
Conspiercy theory? maybe.
Would anyone put it past MS to do that? Nope.
It would be _great_ PR if it works, if it doesn't...well, everyone knows that hotmail is unstable, so noone will be surprised, or suspect anything.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
> My fibre optic fractional T1 opened the edit
:>
> page in less than a second. It took about 3
> seconds to load the list of comments ranked over > '2' but that was mostly CPU usage.
Hmm, aren't 'fibre' and 'T1' contradictory?
-Kysh
--=:: Wings and tail and snout and scales of blackest night
For what it's worth the MS site says the front end pages are handled by just 35 servers ("500,000 pages visited by 5M people a day") and that the entire farm (including databases, test machines, intranet, etc) totals 350 machines (all now running W2K)
N.
Other than simply PR, I wonder why Microsoft would choose to do this. Does the move strike anyone else as a move in a huge pissing contest? Hotmail is a big site... and, for its purpose, it's probably running the OS and web server it should have. I can't help questioning the reasoning behind making a switch to Win2000.
I'd certenly be intrested in how my ZenToe.cgi mesured up to Slashdot under heavy load.
Disclamer: ZenToe.cgi wasn't made for heavy load...
It would be intresting to see what many diffrent web forums do under heavy load under recomended condutions...
(SlashCode using MySQL.. etc)
Oh yeah... ZenToe.cgi.. Linux and NO SQL.. none at all... scary....
That would be intresting to be honnest...
No matter... I expect ZenToe to have the hier load...
I don't actually exist.
Take a look at the download rate, I'm getting an impressive amout of speed from Slashdot vs other websites.
MySQL aside Slashdot runs pritty decently...
However Slashdot loads a larg amount of data perpage. It's not very effecent.
I prefer the KDE browser when loading Slashdot. It caches the images and renders HTML faster than Netscape. If IE ran faster I'd think Microsoft would tout the improvment.
My experence has been however that Netscape is bogged down and poorly design and generally takes a considerable amount of time to render pages.
I count a good 2 or 3 seconds after Slashdot is fully loaded before the page ever displays. Thats on a good day.
All web servers seem to produce similer preforcmence loading at a decent rate and then idling the browser while it renders the page.
I don't actually exist.
As the words of Dr. Evil, Riiiiiight.
Thats why most of the net runs Apache for web-servers, and the other half runs sendmail/sendmail-clone or some other *nix based
mail servers. M$ has no place in the server market because they just can't do it. Their badly coded crap can't handle the load.
They have 3 times the # of mail servers that hotmail does too. And doesn't that make YOU think?
Slashdot is ONE server. and has 2 mail servers. Now explain that over M$'s 5 web-servers? Slashdot gets about 1.5x the hits that M$ does but yet M$ uses more web-servers? explain to me which one is better ! APACHE.
Greetings,
*whispering tone* Interbase...
I like MySQL, but that's because it's a brutally simple entry-level RDBMS. They're adding all the stuff they 'left out' (including the GPL license!), but if I were to look for a hefty and serious free DB right now, I'd go with Interbase.
Cyberfox!
C'mon folks, this is what Netcraft has said; /. is merely quoting them.
/. opinion, not news.
I think it's a good story to post, it's just that the headline is false, and has nothing to do with the article they refer to.
They're just anticipating that maybe Hotmail will have troubles like the last time MS tried this, but that's strictly
Remember when Microsoft put up their Windows 2000 test box and they asked anybody to try and crack it? Well remember how the people who ran SATAN on that IP got the result from SATAN that the network stack resembled a Linux style stack (in the types of responses and whatever SATAN uses to diagnose this). Will I wonder if Windoze 2000 really has a different network stack, and if so, what implementation is it based on (BSD, Linux, whatever), and if so does it really hold up under high strain now? Otherwise, will they just change the OS name returned by uname so that some of the BSD boxen look like windoze boxen (an idea some conspiracy theorists insisted upon back when M$ ran windows 2000 test box)?
So does anyone know what type of network stack windoze 2000 uses?
-Leo
> My fibre optic fractional T1 opened the edit page in less than a second.
Slashdot access from my site is atrocious, but I suspect that's because my coworkers are always busy downloading jpegs from nudiepix.slashdot.org.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Except that this has been in progress for at least a month already.
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
All the same, I'd have felt better about it if it were "Hotmail about to collapse under load?".
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Actually I don't use KDE and don't particularly like it. If I'm biased, I am biased against it.
Microsoft wins too.
Hotmail has never been about making money, just like IE. It's about mindshare and users and pulling them in the the MSN network.
Of course, they sell banner ads to help offset the cost, but I doubt they're making a profit.
It will be worth more as a sales tool than it ever will be as a service when and if they can get it hosted on an MS OS.
I believe hotmail sells its directories (or maby its public I havn't really looked much) But I've set up accounts that I've given to absolutly noone and never used and gotten tons of spam. So I doupt its slashdot.
So you sat down and wrote an article just waiting for slashdot to write some stupid headline for you to post your article under. Who do oyu think you are Jon Katz?? HEHE
No, I already knew that.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I know that Outlook Express has had alot of viruses. Probably some of the spammed e-mail came from addresses stolen from other peoples accounts
..........FULL STOP.
Trying 216.33.151.7...
Connected to www.hotmail.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
get sfd sdf
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2000 22:06:36 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
400 Bad Request
Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Invalid URI in request get sfd sdf
Connection closed by foreign host.
I'm famous!
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Comedy. This website filters out people who want to view it's contents if they're within microsoft.com.
On the same hardware, it is faster...it jsut requires more to get kick-started. I have a friend who has compared, side-by-side, a dual P3-500/256MB running NT4 against a single P3-600/256MB running Win2K. The single CPU box running W2K beat the SMP NT4 box hands-down; the "typical" performance increase of SMP vs. 1 CPU (at the same clock speed) on NT 4 is greater than 20% (which is the MHz difference on the 2 boxes).
But then you'd end up with circular logic.
To make it worse, you can't ban yourself. Those spammers are sure getting nasty, but it looks like they've lost their objective of spamming.
My email addy is
:)
Okay, I've read on LinuxToday that they are moving to Win2000. But no where have I read that it's collapsing under load. A rumour from an "Anonymous Coward" is the last thing that should be posted as fact. Unless there are links to articles, this remains a rumour and it should stay that without getting onto Slashdot.
I must say I noticed the doubleclick ad on one section of the site... I found it interesting and I wondered if anyone else noticed...
Maybe andover.net's management is dictating slashdot should convert to doubleclick.net?
As for webbugs... interesting... hmm...
Yep, I agree, slashdot's public image and the reality of their day-to-day html practices dont quite jive. Whats up here?
I've noted some instability in PostgreSQL lately, so maybe interbase is the way to go?
I note that wierd stuff can happen if you use PHP+apache+persistent connections...
Not really sure though... its hard to say, which is the problem... its more like a phantom problem than anything... elusive and hard to pin down as a real problem.
Just happened to sift through some headers from mail sent from hotmail, and it seems that on or earlier than thursday the 3rd, qmail was replaced for MS Exchange as their mailer daemon. What used to look like this:
Received: (qmail 96968 invoked by uid 0); 8 Jun 2000 17:51:39 -0000
Now looks like this:
Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Sat, 5 Aug 2000 06:24:08 -0700
/cj
having used ms early systems for mail, i guess you are talking about their happy talk about "eating their own dogfood" because they were using ms windows / mail?
Ha.
Did you know they were backending to completely different systems, for years? that the dogfood they were eating on the backend was not their own?
Took me a while to weasel that out of them, but they admitted it after a particularly long and fustrating night when I asked them "I'm running all your stuff and it crashes regularly, how do you stand it???" So, they sheepishly fessed up. Unix backends.
I can tell you we gave up ( we were early NT adopters and had been running DOS ) on ms bakends.
How did we get stability? MTAs = OS/2 platform ( yeah, we still had to reboot the MTA sessions, but at least the platform didn't drop out ) against Novell Servers. that's how we got msmail to vaguely function. vaguely.
dogfood my shaggy bottom. dogfood. ha.
don't get me started. dogfood.
Apache has been ported to NT, by IBM. There is nothing unusually about it. It's sort of neat to run Apache on NT. Confuses people to no end. Check apache for the binaries and try it yourself.
Oh, whoever hired you is a moron.
your just mad cuz you're probably doing something you hate. if i didn't wanna do something, i'd put it on my resume too.
Rubbish - look at the specweb site to see what is actually tested instead of posting inane comments.
__
__
nothin' says lovin' like an open source penguin.
Hrrmm... ever heard of routing and bottlenecks? Guess not.
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
My wife, who relies on Hotmail for her Ebay auctions, has had nothing but problems getting mail for the last 36 hours. After vague replies from their tech support, she has switched to Excite.
Go Microsoft, go.
- Necron69
Apache was never designed for speed. If you want a fast web server, try:
http://www.zeus.co.uk/products/zeus3/
Expensive, though most likely less than the cost of W2K Server+IIS+other monopoly royalties. However, I haven't looked at NT prices for a while, so I wouldn't know for sure.
lucky you :)
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
A concentrated effort by enough ppl with fat pipes (DSL, T1/3, cable) would probably affect it quite a bit... repeated reloads and mailbombs (not that I would advocate such things - it would slow down my connection, too 8^D)
Might have some trouble bringing it all the way to it's knees...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
> They seem to have a policy of using all of the latest Microsoft bells and whistles, whether
> they work reliably or not.
This applies to everything they do, not just their web site. Apply lots of cool stuff. Doesn't work? Who cares!
-- A hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong!
The best strategy would be to continue to use the current system but reprogram it to report itself as Microsoft IIS!
I really doubt it. Doing so doesn't make business sense.
It would be much better to pay full price for the software, thus making it an operating expense for one division (ie, a loss) and increasing the sales of another (ie, press release info). You can then write off the loss in one division for tax purposes, and use the revenue in the other to pay the salaries of the bulk of your employees, as they are located in that division.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Why is bashing MySQL bad? Bad software is bad software.... is bad software - regardless of where it comes from and how much it costs. Just the fact that said piece of s/w is free (beer or speech take your pick) is no excuse for it being lame.
Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second F for this term. - Prof. A.S. Tanenbaum, author of Minix,
siri
I'm sure that Hotmail will work fine under Win2k...after MS spends many thousands of dollars and hours setting up the new system with MS software! And I hope they enjoy updating(and rebooting)all those machines when much-needed bugfixes come out.
YAY for needless expense created by MS! Now let's all upgrade to Win2k for the same functionality we can get elsewhere for free!
I keep having my.yahoo.com time out and not even load, while cNet seems to be slow too. Slashdot timed out a couple of times.
Maybe it's solar flares?
Will in Seattle
The article says MS is moving to Solaris, but they are still on BSD? Could it be Solaris could not handle it either???
I understand your frustration. How hard would it be to make the filter let you specify To: addresses to be allowed?
Otoh, depending on how big the list is, you can make exceptions based on the From: field. I have one mailing list that goes to my hotmail account and a good 95% of it gets through since I made exceptions for the most prolific posters. I just glance at the spamcatch from time to time to see if I've missed anyone new.
I suppose that they're giving to to me for free, and I've blocked the ads that they think will make up the cost, so I haven't too much room to complain...
-- I'm not evil, I'm
I've seen it run on a few systems... private high schools. Impressively stable, moving between 5,000-6,000 emails daily for nearly 10 months at a time without incident.
Mind you, 5-6K is not "a lot" of mail in a day, but it does work OK.
-sid
Apparently what it comes down are the right IT personnel. Maybe your run-of-the-mill MCSE can't double-click fast enough in the face of a seasoned UNIX keyboarder...but NT is good enough to keep some major corporate sites running.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
Nope, it's not Perl either. Unless 'wget' got slipped into 5.6 as a built in function (have to admit I haven't checked), it's missing a system() inside the loop. Let's call it pseudocode, just be charitable, OK smartass?
How many companies could justify the license fees of so many W2K servers?
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
-Omar
This AC here should be at -2 for not knowing his facts. I remember when it happened and laughing my a$$ off!
If I run your script, I get roughly your results, but if I run:
I get
about what netcraft reports.
Jan
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
Ok, according to Netcraft, www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on FreeBSD. Since MS is starting to integrate its Win2k servers, when would that change show up? I guess my question is, why does Netcraft claim it's running FreeBSD when it is running both?
www.poak.net
Not true- this was just a rumor.
Interesting script there. I've run it a few times over the last hour and the load keeps shifting, but consistently it's about 4:1 IIS to Apache. They may be migrating faster than the original article implied -- or, like you suggest, the test is imperfect...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Nope.
Following your link:
"yahoo.com is running unknown on FreeBSD"
They actually use a mix of OSes in their server
pool, but FreeBSD dominates.
Might have filled in a webform that sold it. Thats how a large percentage of email addresses are obtained for spamming. Selling e-mail addresses would financially benifit little shabby outfits built on selling these details, not Microsoft.
What do you expect they should do? It is not unreasonable to expect them to contact the ISP of the user in question (if they can indeed provide proof that it was this person). What the ISP does from there is their responsibility. You say that they don't do shit. I would be curious as to why you are so sure of this?
what?
The majority of these are not sent through Hotmail anyway, as Hotmail is not an effective means for spamming. Instead they use open mail relays with their spamming software and forge the Hotmail addresses. This is something Hotmail will never stop, but it shows that their approach is working if spammers couldn't be bothered using Hotmail as a spam outlet.
Don't access it for 6 months and it will be deleted automatically.
How would the spam keep them active? You need to access it to keep it open. With the cost of storage space nowadays, im sure they can take the couple of kilobyte hit!
amen brother.
I'm sick of these opinions. You proceed from a falsehood - the belief that slash is something other than Taco's personal webtoy. And even if Andover owns it now, it remains Taco's toy. It is not a traditional news site, it is not a journalistic endeavor, it has no obligation to any principles of fairness or journalistic integrity (oxymoron?). If you don't like Taco's site, go read someone elses. Go bitch at MSNBC or abcnews.go.com about thier biases.
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
There are MANY sites on the net that get far more traffic than hotmail (the MSN homepage for instance) and they handle the load just fine.
Right. Virtually ANY page at Microsoft.Com can be counted on to shoot itself in the foot - script errors, interminable or incomplete page loads, and this on thier own venerable IE5 browser under Win98. If you relax the requirement that the served data actually be useable to the client, I'm sure IIS can handle hits up the ass!
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Ways I have killed Win2k:
Installed NT4 driver: BSOD AND worse. (Did it twice :( when there wasn't any win2k drivers yet) And and they didn't even give a waning on install.
Move the Boot partion to a new drive: It boots but it does an auto logout on login. Not really useful. This worked fine in NT.
Installed a 3rd party mouse driver that died (This time it was a Win2k driver): Why are the mouse and the keyboard controled by the same driver? This seems stupid to me. If this driver dies, you are fubar. And once you have booted correctly once, you can't change to a working driver(No keyboard or mouse).
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I've used Win2k, and it is one of the finer OSes out there. And the thought of a crapload of Win2k boxes serveing up Hotmail makes me wanna go sign up for an email account.
I use Linux, but I love Win2k
Are they running IIS or Apache on W2K ?
Yeah, and there is this thing called "net congestion." I've never had the problems you complain about. My Slashdot pages always load in less than 20 seconds. Not fast sometimes, but not that incredibly slow. And hey, these are pretty big files being downloaded!
Some of us realize that there are other reasons for net slowness besides MS. I mean, backhoes probably cause more damage in the short term, etc.
I have no idea how many mailboxes they have, but # of mailboxes and simultaneous logins are two TOTALLY different things. I have no doubt that NT could STORE 40 million mailboxes.. but I bet even their free-bsd farm would collapse if all 40 million tried to log in at the same time!
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
M$ would certainly sell anything for a buck. Everyone I know with a hotmail acount gets three times the spam I w/o one.
I can't confirm it but I have yet to receive any spam on my Hotmail account and I've had it for two years. My hotmail address is something that fits the description given to thwart spam.
-Vel
Ya, lets believe some anonymous ranter that SAID he worked there.
No, i think he's on the mark. You seem to admit there's something wrong with your statement about mem usage increasing over time. I have interdev crashing whenever i type Request.Form.Key( i )...as soon as the last ) gets typed, it dies, even with intelisense off. Consistently, w/the newest sp. To be fair my machine is the only one doing it; but we all have the same hw and software. I've also had other quirks that have caused me to reboot. Like i couldn't drag any windows or icons anymore. So no i don't think he's claim that it still crashes once or twice a week is wrong, i have these problems everyday. Other people working with me have similar problems.
Yes, I agree that this will be the acid test to see if Win2k can handle a real load, but I think the big question in my mind will be: how many win2k servers did it take to replicate the load handling ability of the freeBSD servers? I mean, put 500 machines in a load-balanced system and they can all be horribly unstable but the overall system would be fine. (a bitch to maintain, but hey it is msft)
B.t.w, using my monitoring script, I noticed that the percentage went down from 5% to 2.5% after 5pm (in Europe, i.e. as the Americans awoke).
This shows that, when more load is coming, the number of requests answered by the NT machines goes down relatively. In other words, they cannot handle the same load as the FreeBSD machines (taking longer to process a request).
I'm sure this is another Signal 11 / Enoch Root bizarre karma burning scheme, but nevertheless I'll bite.
WTF are you talking about? All this guy does is attach one-line replies that look vaguely like moderations to random posts.
Thank you.
4920616D206E6F7420656C6974652E
Email me.
+++ATH0
OK I'm sorry. Somebody PLEASE explain this bullshit to me.
If you were going to troll, couldn't you troll like a normal little horned creature? What is this guy trying to accomplish? He's posting as AC so he's not going to accumulate negative karma. Everything he says is irrelevant, bizarre blustering.
In case he's actually SERIOUS:
IT'S A NEWS SITE. JUST a news site, with a comment system for those who think they might have something to say about the news. Like my beloved Ars Technica. Go there if you want a higher signal to noise ratio, K?
Thank you.
4920616D206E6F7420656C6974652E
Email me.
+++ATH0
::blush:: Never mind. http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/individual/pakin/compl aint
Thank you.
4920616D206E6F7420656C6974652E
Email me.
+++ATH0
::groan::
m plaint
Next time I'll actually READ the letter instead of vaguely skimming it.
IHBT. IHL.
http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/individual/pakin/co
Thank you.
4920616D206E6F7420656C6974652E
Email me.
+++ATH0
At no time since the last server switchover has a page taken 92 seconds, or even a minute, to load for me. In fact, most of the time the response is instantaneous. Even those 400 comment pages that are 1/2 a meg load pretty quickly. Sure, I have a T1 at work here, but the problem is probably en route to Slashdot, not slashdot itself..
As a side note, my company is on the Exodus network, so I probably have fewer hops to slashdot than most...
_________________
JavaScript Error: http://www.windows2000test.com/default.htm, line 91:
Actually, I've heard that the number of slashdotters is past a half million.
there's apache for a lot of OS's, including macOS and OS 2. So, it's not strange to see Apache somewhere other than linux/bsd/unix variants.
That will cause it to bypass the Bulk Mail filter.
I just wish filters allowed you to filter by To address (and CC, etc.), not just From and Subject - but as it stands, it's still useful.
-Ariel
Correction: Normandy (the product which became the Commercial Internet System) was announced in June '96 as a set of addons to IIS 2.0 or 3.0 (IIRC). One of the early purchasers was Compuserve, who were (ironically) using it to help their migration from proprietary to open internetworking standards. By release 2.0, it had been renamed as Site Server: some of the Normandy stuff (such as the mail server) moved into the Option Pack.
This process has continued: there isn't going to be a Site Server 2000 'cos all the functionality is either provided natively, moved under the aegis of other parts of BackOffice or has thankfully been deprecated (Active Channel multicasting, anyone?)
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
I just this afternoon noticed that they were not using qmail as they normally do.
This was in the header of a message I received from a Hotmail user:
Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Tue, 1 Aug 2000 20:45:31 -0700
Received: from 202.14.100.58 by lw7fd.law7.hotmail.m sn.com with HTTP; Wed, 02 Aug 2000 GMT
Another from the same Hotmail user is using qmail.
While I agree with you in general, this is going a bit too far. If Hotmail is down or unresponsive for a couple days (until MS presumably switches back to the existing FreeBSD machines), then I doubt very many non-geek people will notice, much less care. And even then, don't expect to see it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
(Just trying to add a dash of realism to this discussion :-) )
Will it really? Or will MS just throw millions of dollars, and hundreds of engineers, at the project, just to make sure it doesn't fail? I would expect if MS wanted to, they could even run Hotmail on Win95; of course, you'd need TONS of hardware and a really, really good load balancing and failover system, but all that means is more $$$
Sorry, guy, it's IIS 5 on Win2K now. Too bad, I was looking forward to a giggle.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I tend to disagree with you there since cdrom.com can set the real world single day download record with a single FreeBSD computer while MS needs to maintain a server farm of dozens of computers to even come close.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
What OSes does Motorola make?
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Notice that is says (my emphasis):
Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on Windows 2000
Shouldn't it says win32, NT or something like that?
- Isaac =)
Hotmail allows you to automatically filter bulk email. Just click on the option for Bulk Mail and it uses its own heuristics to figure out which mail is Bulk Mail and you can choose to delete it without even reading it.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It's one of the funniest things I've ever read!
Mmmm.. Donuts
"These fluctuate about 5-15 Million each day as the inactive ones are turned off.. .. Hotmail adds around 300,000 new accounts each day. They have to build new clusters as fast as they can to keep up with the demand. "
Did I miss something here or:
- 5,000,000 Inactive accounts
+ 300,000 New Accounts daily
------------------------------
- 4,700,000 Accounts daily.
"They have to build new clusters as fast as they can to keep up with the demand. "
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
As with all things M$, it's about marketing instead of using the right tool for the job...
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
First of all I think 180 megs for KDE sounds way too much (I don't run KDE myself though, so I can't be 100% sure)...
But my real point is... Who'd run KDE (or the X Window system at all) on a web/mail server anyway?!?
If you should compare these things you should compare *BSD/Linux/whatever running only what it needs to do the job and still be fully administrable against Win2k with what it needs to do the same...
My guess would be that you'd have more memory left on the *NIX machines...
And no, I'm not saying that Win2k is just crap and that *NIX beats the shit out of it in all fields........
--
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
Slashdot just spent 92 seconds opening this edit page.
/. is slow, it usually means something is going down and I want to read about it right away!!
When it takes this long to load a Slashdot page, I usually click my reload button rapidly. Although this doesn't always help, I do it anyways because, when
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
Maybe you mean 1997/1998?
"Widget choice makes me horny." -
I wasn't aware that Cisco had a "real" Load Balancer ...
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
It's quite simple actually. The machine that accepts the TCP connection (the load balancer) forwards it on to one of a pool of webservers. Sometimes also called reverse proxying. Obviously the load balancer and the webservers do not need to run the same OS, as you see in this example.
Get REAL!A load balancer IS NOT doing reverse proxying. The exception would be mod_backhand and I am quite sure that's not what you were talking about. When you do load balancing and you have Microsoft's wallet, you use real stuff. Big-IP, Webserver Director, stuff like that. Those appliances are dedicated to do that type of stuff. You can use the excellent mod_backhand but since it does not do failover, it's a plus not a replacement. Now let's see
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
01/08/2000 is today, it's the first of August 2000. Europe has a diffrent dateformat than the U.S.
Try setting up a hotmail account, and never use it. Log in a few weeks later and stare in disbelief.
I did exactly that... I was curious as to how much spam I would get for not touching a new hotmail account. So I just created one and sent a test email to my Yahoo! account. When I checked my Yahoo account, it dumped the email into my Spam Folder.... hehehehe...
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Attempt #1 at Netcraft: www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on FreeBSD
Attempt #2: www.hotmail.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
So... They DO already have some Win2k servers helping out.
"I always wanted to be a procrastinator,
A good question would be -- With Hotmail's dependance on qmail, and qmail's dependance on UNIX and variants -- What will Microsoft use for a MTA on Windows 2000?
Or will they just handle the web (display) load on Win2K, and use BSD/qmail for deliveries?
-mls
> Where's the semi-colon?
It's pseudocode. Pseudocode doesn't need semicolons. Unless you are actually using the pseudocode compiler (it's available at http://127.0.0.1, at least on my machine).
-Legion
>That additional 10% wouldn't buckle under the load right away, because they are *additional*, which was my point.
:-)
So if you have a network of computers that you want to use for some task, you would load them to the rim serially, rather than parallellizing the tasks at hand evenly among all the nodes?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
>This goes to show how much you should trust one data point.
;-)
Yours included! Hee hee
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You are forgetting the vast amounts of /. readers scripting to see if the 5% load-balance is indeed correct ;-)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
too bad it cant do php , cgi , etc .. its just made for static files
not really download.microsoft.com already runs sunos 5.7 which is bsd =P
uhm.. it doesnt do php
I want Windows 2000 to become more stable. It's my primary desktop OS (I wouldn't use it for serving, mainly because it's a pain to program for) -- but even if it weren't, I would want it to be good. I want all software to be good.
Exactly. Right now, since the W2K machines are only handling 5-10% of the load, your chances of getting one are fairly small. And it'd be impossible to evaluate anyway unless you knew how many users (or whatever) a W2K machine was expected to serve.
-RickHunter
Oh, please. That wait time could've been anything from high network traffic in your region to something intensive happening on one of the servers between you and Slashdot to system load on your own machine lagging your web browser. I know that mine seems a lot faster than that (Mozilla claims that my edit window opened in 3.02 seconds!). If you can find out how long Slashdot thinks it took to deliver your page and compare it with a W2K server delivering the same page, then you might have something.
-RickHunter
nevermind, I forgot that Linux never crashes. I bet the problem was related to Microsoft.
You got hired because you didn't want to learn something? Must have been a rigourous process. SIGN ME UP!!
That's probably true.
My girlfriend's address @hotmail is quite long and I don't think that she's been spammed even once, and that in about two or three years...
Although everyone here will go "it'll never work" or "it'll fail instantly", my experience with Windows 2000 is that, if properly set up, it can be quite a stable platform. We should all be watching closely, since this will be a real test to see whether Windows 2000 can meet or exceed an equivalent UNIX+Apache system.
While I agree with you that this is going to be a good test for Win2K. I don't think that you can say this can prove Win2K better than a Unix variant. This is only because you don't know how many boxes they are putting in to replace each of the old BSD boxes that they are taking out.
In other words, what kind of test is it to say that 400 Win2K boxes can handle the same load as 200 BSD boxes.
Anyone have any experience with scaling webservers across different platforms?
I'm curious about the difficulties involved in mixing BSD/Apache and Win2k/IIS.
There aren't too many similarities between the two on fundamental levels (fs, security management, etc) so the Win2k servers really can't be doing much aside from serving the generated web pages, right?
For instance, mixing sendmail with the MS mail crap can't be efficient, and unless all the email is stored in a DB or something one would need to be able to read mail from the BSD spooler and the MS spooler, which sounds like a nightmare. And if they're using Perl or something akin to it at all, then (as many know) it's not always easy making a cgi run on Win when it runs perfectly under linux/apache, etc.
guess I wanna know if you really can mix oil and water...anyone done it?
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
Heh.
Anyway, I read the replies to your post, and I'll just two of my own observations:
- A complaint: Yes, NT5 does crash. And yes, when I've seen it crash, it usually takes a while to figure out why (if you ever do).
- A caveat: However, all of the crashes I've seen were due to buggy device drivers (which I can't blame on MS; they weren't signed/certified drivers) or happened when setting up new applications.
I'd imagine that once you get the applications configured properly, NT5 will make a dandy server. It may not perform as well as UNIX or give you as much "bang for the buck" for the hardware (hell, and it only runs on crappy x86), but for small/medium load file/mail/web serving, it would probably be fine. I'm guessing that if Microsoft tries to move Hotmail to NT5, they'll do it by using many, many, many servers (don't think server farm... think server plantationThe trouble with such things is that it's very difficult to get clear, objective information. 99% of people advocating NT/IIS are MS astroturfers, and 99% of people advocating Linux/Apache are script kiddies like Malda (oh come on, I'm kidding. Slash is a fine script, very fine!). The astroturfers probably haven't used UNIX or a Unix-workalike in ten years, and the script kiddies have never used NT (they assume it's just like Windows 95, the only MS product they used before escaping the "evil empire" and going Finnish). (It's funny... many Linux-converts could probably find NT5 very useful, but couldn't fathom paying for Microsoft-ware for fear of shame!) Almost no one can speak objectively about both. The benchmarks are useless and don't give much real-world performance data. And performace is only one of many issues behind selection of a server platform. And on and on...
What were we talking about? Oh yeah, NT5 crashing... sure, it crashes, but GNU/Linux doesn't have proper Java support... or decent games support... or web browsers as nice as those available under Windows (Netscape on Win32 10x better than on Lin32!)... or mail clients as nice as those available under Windows (speaking as a former mutt-junky)... or proper graphics/sound support... or a billion other things. But GNU/Linux gives me stability... speed... the UNIX development environment I love... and excellent, high quality, free software such as EGCS, Perl, The GIMP, Apache (some of these have been ported to Win32 but the ports aren't production quality), and dammit, I just like it. Why do people have to be so millitant about their platforms? "My OS, right or wrong." I couldn't stand limiting myself to one platform... my CD shelf at my desk has software for two UNIX systems, four UNIX-workalikes, and two Microsoft Windows systems. And I enjoy using each one, and I get something from each that I can't from the others.
I don't know why, reading Slashdot, I keep thinking this lately, but:
Can't we all just get along?
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
No, he just ran: http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/ individual/pakin/complaint
--
I would bet Hotmail sells the email addresses. Sure, I've given out my email address to several porn sites, but I've always been very sure to uncheck the box that says, "Subscribe me to the prono mailing list." (Everytime, I swear!) And still... I get porn spam! Egad, it must be Microsoft selling my Hotmail email addy....
Umm, let's try to apply a bit of knowledge, hmm?
How much value would Hotmail get from selling its userlist to 2-bit pr0n spambags? Especially considering since many of them are unemployable beyond McDonalds, and even that's doubtful.
There's several ways for someone to get your address, without it ever being exposed.
1) Someone had your username before, and it was snagged for one of those "millions CDs" you see spams for now and again. The previous owner of that username bit-bucketed the account, leaving it open for someone else to take later.
2) As a variation of (1) above, they can take addresses that are known to exist at one domain, and try tacking the username onto another domain name. For example, if there's a "dan@ISP", they try dan@JUNO, dan@HOTMAIL, dan@YAHOO, and so forth. More than a few people recycle usernames on different providers/services, so this isn't as time consuming as one would think at first glance.
3) Dictionary attack. Spambag takes his favorite bit of Spew-O-Matic[tm] crapware and sets it to randomly thump on various common words/phrases by way of either VRFY or RCPT TO commands sent to the target, noting which ones come back as valid usernames. For a service like Hotmail, with millions of users, the value (as spambags see it) is rather high, as they can get a metric butt-tonne of addresses while setting their machine to scan while they sleep at night. (As an added bonus, from a spammer's PoV, late at night many admins aren't around, making for less of a chance of being caught.)
Continuing on with the less likely possibilities (far less likely, at that)...
4) Some low-level droid thought they could make a few bucks on the side, and snuck out a Zip disk full of addresses (even being smaller than a CD, e-mail addresses don't exactly take up a lot of space). They then take this disk and sell the names on it to some "e-commerce expert" (euphemism for a slightly higher-grade spambag), which leads to oh-so-enticing ads for "Hot cunny waiting for your dick!" and so forth.
5) Provider shares the address with another company, and it gets swiped from the second company's machines via the sloppy security implied by (4).
6) Marketing department looks at all those names, and thinks they'll all be interested in their Exciting Offer![tm], even if you said "not a chance would I want your crap" upon signup. (This isn't as much of an issue with Hotmail as it is elsewhere, IME.)
I'm sure there's other ways ones address could be leaked out without it officially seeing the light of day, but those are the biggies.
Dan "Why, yes, I have thought about it a bit. Why do you ask?" Poore
[insert witty quote here]
The Register posted that on 01/08/2000... So, one would be left to believe that if Microsoft was having any luck migrating, the percentages would be higher than 5-10 by now.
Sent from my iPhone
Maybe you mean 1997/1998?
Has anyone stopped to think that it's a really good thing that Microsoft uses a Microsoft server platform for all of their servers whether or not it's the right tool for the job? If you think about it, what better way is there to improve your OS than to start using it on a large scale.
/. that would be happier about Microsoft failing (just for the sake of it) than everyone being eventually offered the chance to buy a decent product from them. Too many here are happy about having a choice as long as it ends in nix.
Don't forget that there's a lot here on
I have a hotmail account... and i've never received any spam on it...
Amazing magic tricks
Spammers probably take names from the headers of those stupid forwards that everyone sends all over the place...
Amazing magic tricks
lc2.law5.hotmail.com
were all served by Apache. I wonder what's wrong
This .sig is covered by the GPL
at defcon, they did test a couple of 2000 servers in the pool but found that it was having major problems with sending out too many DNS requests and they had pretty much discounted using 2000 in their server pool. He said that they sent back a list of like 42 things 2000 would need to be ready for prime time in their server pool.
Woah, Windows 2000 is free now?
This guy is so smart, thanks for straightening me out, I'm going to delete Linux and install Win2k right now. Long Live Windows 2000 !
Lars -
It might affect the breakup, but the trial, as I understand it, was about monopolistic tactics Microsoft used in the past, not whether or not Microsoft has cleaned up its act with Win2k.
--
i've been having problems with hotmail this week. now i too have my suspicions.
For some reason, the public still respects Microsoft. Well, not the monopoly part, but the software part. It's us wacky Linux-users with our long crazy hair (well some of us) and yada yada who rant about how Microsoft is bad. I think it'd be good if somebody did a very professional compilation of all the *crap* Microsoft has done, and then how they try to deny it, delay fixing it, etc., and then use it to show that Microsoft really isn't such a good thing. Oh, and somebody should modify that script that was out way back when Microsoft set up their "unhackable" server that made it so being on the site accessed their server over and over again (thus making tons of bandwidth, and the Microsoft server ended up crashing a lot, in case you forgot) so that it accesses Hotmail instead. That would make my day.
First of all, that's a perfect way to make your point. Just curse and call me whatever ya want ;-)
... I cannot see why that would be such a big deal. I still don't miss any apps on Linux ... name me a couple of those apps that W2K has, that Linux should have too
Ok, since I _can_ read, let's try again:
"W2K is much more stable than Linux. Plus, it works faster and has more apps than Linux."
Maybe I am blind but here I read that an advantage of W2K over Linux is that it has more apps
--
B10m, The blind fucking idiot.
- Start posting with some better ID than Anonymous Coward
- If everyone is a "fucking idiot" or a "fucking moron", maybe it's not them, but you
- "learn_to_fucking_read"
... if the world is misunderstanding your postings, post 'em more clearly
--B10m
"Operator error. W2K is much more stable than Linux. Plus, it works faster and has more apps than Linux."
... Could you ?
Since when does "more apps" make an OS perfect ? I can't think of an app I miss for Linux
--
B10m
- http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=y ahoo.com
Ermmm could ya explain that please ?And the other examples still don't use Winblow servers
--
B10m
According to the Terms of Service, you are not allowed to use Hotmail for your primary business address. So Mr. Joe Cheapfuck really has no reason to bitch when M$ shuts down his joesreallycoolbusiness@hotmail.com account.
Right Now, our government is doing things you think only other governments do.
you must be new here, get used to bashing anything not linux. the rules are pretty simple.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
But you're forgetting FreeBSD can run linux binaries with no problem.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Don't judge everyone vecause of one crackhead moderator. Morons exist in every part of the world and morons use all kinds of OS'es. A few of them even use linux...
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Although I'm anti-MS and pro-unix I agree with you on the stupid moderation. But remember also that this is no jurnalism. It's people judging other peoples comments. The only jurnalism is the longer articles (a la JonKatz), the rest are links to external articles (with short comment) and discussions around them...
Thank you.
//Frisco
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
With last version of Win, several users use the same computer simultaneously can! Yeees! Another MS innovation it is!
//Frisco
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
darn as if Dan Bernstein's ego isn't big ;)
enough
Ricardo.
Yes. The problem with hotmail/yahoo etc accounts is that so many people uses them, and that they have predictable names (like james_9991@hotmail) etc.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Probably spammers trying names at random.
Try setting up a hotmail account, and never use it. Log in a few weeks later and stare in disbelief.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Ah. You obviously haven't seen THAT episode of SNL...:)
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I did not use my hotmail address for my slashdot account.
unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umou
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Which is kind of funny, because as near as I can tell, Hotmail already collapsed under the load.
I run a mailing list server. For some peculiar reason, I've got people who insist on subscribing with Hotmail accounts (even though they could subscribe with the forwarded-to account and post with the Hotmail address just fine).
They get automatically unsubscibed about every three to five days, because Hotmail is bouncing their mail with a permanent error. This has been going on for about three months. I've seriously considered just blacklisting Hotmail altogether, but I figure if people want to keep resubscribing and resubscribing and resubscribing, that's their lookout. The ping message they get a week after the bounce tells them Hotmail is hosed, so they have to know it's happening.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
I got tired of getting mails from staff@hotmail.com on my hotmail account so I blocked that address along with their mailer daemon, it is really funny
You may not like Microsoft, but Windows 2000 is a very capable operating system. The fastest databases in the world run on w2k. Sure, FreeBSD might be even faster at certain things, and being free is a big win, but this doesn't mean that w2k sucks. Heck, even Lycos is switching to it.
Slashdot has become the Weekly World News of tech sites. What a pot of crap.
I don't understand why Microsoft didn't learn their lesson the first time. NT 4.0 bombed when they cut Hotmail to it, so what makes them think that 2000 will do better? Built on NT technology??? Besides, why can't they leave well-enough alone?
Yep. Spammers try random hotmail addresses. A lot.
I know because I've set up accounts to flame certain people privately, and yet others that I've set up, but never used -- addresses not given out anywhere. All are spam targets.
Note they say the rumors are inaccurate, not false. Any minute mistake would allow them to say this.
well im glad you are part of the C.D.C WE will see how well nt two hundred works under a load that scales beyond lets say 50,000 or so users at any given time...with the = amount of machines which are being primarily bsd/apache. La vaca todo mira con los ways de attrition tambien....*_^ La vaca de muerte va a matarte! Debes tener mucho miedo!
As I understand it, in order to make this work, Microsoft undertook a significant porting effort. Anyone with more than 5 minutes in web development knows that BSD-based systems and Windows-based systems take very different approaches to architecture.
I can't find the link right now, but I recall reading that the developers were under a lot of pressure to get it to work on Win2000 and deviated quite a bit from MS's own recommendations for web development on Win2000. Hopefully, some more details on this will be forthcoming. If I find them, I'll be sure to post them to slashdot.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
Did you know that most of the servers are built by Intel and later rebadged by the OEMs ???
;-)
So, MS can buy them directly from the Intel factories and save some money
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I can bet that the new computers will be much more powerful then the old ones.
Depending on when the old ones were bought, they will most likely be dual-proc. Even replacing 2 such computers with one 8-proc will multiply the processing power significantly, especially since the new processors will be clocked significantly higher.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
That's odd... I've had an account there for over a year. No spam yet...
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Index of /hotmail/users/l/littlejohnny/ w indows98_machine.txt _ not_spam.txt
Updated: Thu Mar 9 05:00:05 2000
From-Mom--Subject-Hotmail_is_pretty_cool.txt
From-Dad--Subject-mom_wont_quit_using_the_damn_
From-YourFriend--Subject-Get_Rich_Quick_this_is
You didn't call me a liar, you just said I wasn't telling the truth..? errr.... oh-kay ;)
As for video drivers, the ones I run now are beta, but the ones I used to run were not. I've had the same problem with both. I don't think that a video driver failure would look like it (winamp bursts out half a second of music at a time like 10 seconds apart, no input gets any reaction...)
As for blue screens, I don't know how, but I know it crashes (never seen it, just heard him talk about it). It might just as well be some other kind of crash. I think I did see a blue screen once though, when my machine rebooted, I think it flickered a BSOD at me for a second or so (IIRC there's an option somewhere to autoreboot in case of a crash, I have it on, and that could be the reason noone sees a blue screen anymore).
Regarding Win2k betas, those where very very far from the final release, and I had so much problems with those it's incredible.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Oh damn we're all stupid. Let's not think Microsoft ever lie about anything. That'd be dumb. Oh, and they never leak anything either.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Of course it will... and then it wont be long until you hear MS marketing saying "look, one of the biggest sites on the internet, hotmail.com, runs on MS products, if our products can handle that, they can handle anything.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Well, I run Win2k pro as a desktop... and let's say it's better than Win9x, it only crashes once a week or once every two weeks, but no way I'd use it as a server...
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
I never said Windows 2000 wasn't a decent product. It eats lots of less memory than Win98 did (I have 384 megs RAM, Win98 would eat all that in one night... bleh), so I've never had any memory problems with Win2k (though I guess it could just be me not noticing).
So, this machine has crashed maybe once each two weeks on average, the one at work has crashed on me only once, my father runs a Win2k server (yeah he's one of them windows pros) that bluescreens each time you send it too large print jobs.
All in all... I think Win2k is a decent OS... for a desktop. I still wouldn't ever wanna use it as a server. YMMW. Don't call me a liar just because your experience is different. And I was very far from bashing blindly, I use the OS each day.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Simply, there's no impartial information regarding this at all. In this case, as you pointed out later, there are other reasons that point in this direction, but just because there are no evidence doesn't mean I'll trust what MS says more.
Simply put: I think MS would still claim it never happened, even if there were strong evidence that it did.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
I used NetCraft and did a little research, and I found out a few things.
1. All the servers that are *actually* in the hotmail domain still run BSD.
2. Some of the servers within the passport.com domains are Win2K, some BSD.
3. All of the front-end servers at hotmail.msn.com are using Windows 2000.
4. I have no idea what the back-end servers of hotmail.msn.com, which actually handles the mail, are running.
My email is real.
"Will W2K be more unstable in 2 or 3 years?"
Just let them release a few 'service' releases...
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
That might explain why her account, which was a word followed by some digits, got spammed while my Hotmail account, which was actually my initials followed by digits, didn't. It's not actually a word, and it's long enough (I spelled part of my name out the entire way, putting me past 5 chars) that it probably won't be gotten randomly. Except I finally did get an porno spam today, so even I may no longer be safe...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I have yet to figure out how she did that. Either her friends are into some... strange stuff and gave her address out (which I doubt), or someone managed to obtain her address to spam it. But the strange thing was that it was all basically porno ads. M$ might sell addresses to big companies, but I didn't think MS was into the porn industry. Maybe some Hotmail exec traded the address book for free access to a porn site.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
If Microsoft continues on their extremely slow security patch trail, combined with the plethora of security vulnerabilities in Hotmail, combined with the disappointing news of the estimated 65,000 bugs in Windows 2000, I highly suspect that Hotmail will be pretty much always open to anyone that wants access to someones account.
I'm also willing to bet my bottom dollar that they want to use some 'Hotmail runs W2k, you should too' propaganda otherwise they wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole - look at how much attention this switchover is creating! It better be worth their while, and it isn't going to be any cheaper on a windows 2000 platform. I think its all about the propaganda.
It's true that SMTP support, even through Exchange on NT has been somewhat lacking compared to Sendmail on UNIX. However, I've been running some tests for my current contract with W2K and Exchange2K-RC2, and it's actually pretty slick (compared to before). I would go so far as to say it's as good as Sendmail, but it's a giant leap over Exchange 5.5 on NT 4.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
yeah, they get booted and then sign up as a different user so they can to it again.
My wife gets all sorts of spam from addresses like asdfjkl123@hotmail.com... There are a lot of different random combinations for spammers to use for new accounts.
But the obvious question is: why is sendmail part of OpenBSD and not this?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I set up an @home account and cable modem a month ago. In that time, I have gotten 0 Spam adverts!
This goes to show how much you should trust one data point.
"and 5-10% from Windows 2000"
Your 5-6% falls under what they say even though they seem to have used a higher value to impres the media.
I'll bet it's just slightly better than the US postal services.
It's more likely M$ is leaking addresses. I've hasd similar problems, with a non-dictionary address that wasn't registered for anything.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I think I'll register 2000 hotmail accounts, and sign them up for all the spam they can get, and see how much m$ likes their precious w2k. I think it's a good thing they use FreeBSD and Linux. Either they will learn something from it, or they will keep eating the competition, one or the other.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
NT4 wasn't stable when it first came out.
It isn't stable now.
W2K Isn't stable now.
What Makes you think it will be ever??
O.K. maybe it got better than it was.
Does anyone realy think that that is good enough??
Since when has anyone been able to call exchange an effective mail server??
...it is beggining to look almost as spotty as Slashdot!
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
I've had even worse problems, and it is definitely NOT coming from my cable connection. After giving up on reloading the home page (that's after about 10 tries!) I went over to Yahoo to see if it WAS my connection, and guess what? Yahoo loaded in about 2 seconds.
Go figure...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
The real problem IMHO is that Microsoft has nothing that even remotely compares to Sendmail.
Correction: Microsoft had a product called Commercial Internet Mail Server. Nobody bought it, it was blotted out of MS Official History, and one of the few references I can find to it on their site is the notice that support is being cancelled.
It's possible they hacked this to get it to work under W2000 for internal purposes. I'll bet someone's nut that they ain't using Exchange (which supposedly had a role in the failure of the last conversion).
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The mail thing in IIS 4/5 is a simple drop-box and forwarder. I doubt even Microsoft would have the balls to try to sell it to ISPs as a "commercial" quality MTA. It looks like the CIS mail and news servers were different beasts all together, although you are right about the rest of it ending up in Site Server.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Your sig: That's not a statement. Therefore, it's false on the grounds that its premise is invalid.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
We can always believe the crazy rumors benchmark people were making that say that IIS can serve more pages at a time, etc, etc, etc...
If that's the case, sure go for it. I think HotMail has sucked ever since it became Microsoft (just look what happened to the UI), and they've already dug their own grave for themselves.
This will jsut be another thing that will cause people to stop using HotMail, much like that simple login/security issue a little while back. I say, let them do it and see for themselves. It just proves Microsoft is wrong!
First the KDE's were clients, not servers. I wouldn't necessarily run KDE on a server (unless I had an admin who was totally clueless and needed a GUI to admin the server).
And yes, it's 180 megs - buffers included. I find it hard to guess why you wouldn't include buffers in the total (this is memory that is being taken up by the system which needs to be given up before other apps can use it).
Why is free memory a good thing? Well for starters, my client at home runs games. :) But the people at work use tools like Photoshop and Premiere, which eat up a ton of memory. Either this or they poll the memory from disk (speedwise, you do the math).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Someone made an interesting point: why WOULDN'T we compare a Win2000 server to a Linux setup using KDE or Gnome? The whole point (or argument, if you will) is that people use Win2000 because it's easier to operate (and there is a single point of reference to call when blame needs to be placed). If you're comparing Win2000 to a command-line server, aren't you weighing an unnecessary bias against Win2000. Why not go GUI on GUI?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, if an app causes a crash of itself - bad app. If an app causes a crash of itself and other apps (say, through data sharing or IPC or file lock problems) - baaad apps. If an app causes the operating system to lock up, or even worse, BSOD (or that OS's equivalent) - BAD OS!
Of course, this is rarely seen in modern software practice - but that's the philosophy I was taught, and I like it - I'll stick with it.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
You are assuming that Microsoft would do what makes sense instead of what could make Windows look good (but instead made it look bad). I can definitely see a reason why MS would try an instant migration to NT. Billy G. is famous (infamous?) for saying "Do it, do it now!" without bothering to listen to rational explainations as to why it would be better to wait.
Of course, having said that, I still think they would have to have been completely insane to do it that quickly unless it was something that was in the works before they 'aquired' Hotmail, which is entirely possible as well.
Bite my yammer.
It's not about having an actual reason, Microsoft is trying to get rid of all the negative PR because the don't even run their own OS on their servers.
-Antipop
Hey!
But then geeks laugh at them anyway.
Do you think anyone's registered PointAndLaugh@hotmail.com??? What about Throw.Sh1t@hotmail.com??? Swear@hotmail.com??? Laugh.At.Lame.OS@hotmail.com???
Spamproof-ish as well. The possibilities are endless...
Michael Tandy
...another insightless comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Try Gotmail. It lets you download all of your mail without having to go near the web site (*big* increase in speed there)... basically letting you use your hotmail account as an anonymous forwarding address. ;-)
It hurts to see this, once upon a time Microsoft would have modified the Apache source to look like Microsoft-IIS/5.0. In other words, innovate. Now look what they have been reduced to, inadvertantly admitting that their product is inferior to an open source alternative.
The shame.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
"Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" --McCoy
from the Star Trek Episode: ELAAN OF TROYIUS
---
---
Why are there so many people always asking for whirled peas?
You get tons of spam because people can send mail to hotmail.com in general and the server relays it to every user. Microsoft has a really weak "spam protection" feature for Hotmail that supposedly stops it, but it is not that great and anything that is mailed to your address still gets through. The only true protection you can have is set up your mail filtering rules to remove letters with subjects that your friends would not use. Even then you'll still get >6 letters per week that are just spam.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Perhaps this is why W2K isn't selling so well?
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
In other words, lighten up.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
I work on a NT network, I know it won't work.
Yes, I just posted that as a probable example of the 5-10% that had been migrated.
The real problem is that this has nothing to do with the original subject. I was hoping for some BSD news, instead I had to scan through that garbage trying to find something relavent... thanks for cheese.
I can assure you that W2K and microsoft will run hotmail just fucking fine. Everyone who thinks otherwise just plain linux stupid.
Hmmm. Ok, that will be very interesting. I wonder when they'll start running Hotmail jsut fucking fine. I recall similar sentiments when Microsoft switched Hotmail over from Solaris to NT. Hmmm....I guess that ran Hotmail just fucking fine, and that's why they switched to FreeBSD. Isn't that right, Anonymous?"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
I used to work with a couple of NT boxes that worked like a dream serving hundreds of thousands of pages a month, uptime of three to six months each.
I once saw a Linux box crash.
I conclude NT is vastly superior to Linux and will continue to ignore Linux despite a new kernel and new versions of all the software I ran on it being released.
Bollocks.
One experience does not make a rule.
--
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
[pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b [pistol@intranet pistol]$ pscan www.hotmail.com 80 80 80 (www) Running: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 [pistol@intranet pistol]$ -------------------------------------------------- --------- Thats how many times it took it get a win 2000 box using my portscan/web server info util i wrote.
Thats not how it works at all. The string that he copied and pasted was taken from a head request. Connect to www.hotmail.com on port 80 and type "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" followed by 4 or so returns. You will see the version of the web server it is running and usually the OS it was compiled on (if its Apache) along with the mods. This works for most web servers unless the feature has been intentionally turned off.
I'd like to see this data substantiated, but its nice to know that all those folks that forked out the big bucks for win2k have such an "advanced" o.s. that it can't even handle doing something as simple as web hosting. poor thing.
How many boxes (processors, Microsoft software is licensed by processor) are we talking here? 1000? More? The licensing fees to do this would run into the millions of dollars. Only Microsoft itself could afford to replace FreeBSD with Windows 2000 on that many machines. -Matt
CompuServe tried FreeBSD for a while, and essentially abandoned it (some few things on the CompuServe service were running on it for a while). They also migrated some stuff to NT. Dunno what they're running now, that they're really AOL...
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
You will make an excellent drone in our collective.
We are Microsoft. You will be Innovated(tm). Resistance it futile.
Hasn't M$ tried this move before, around 1987/1988, and didn't Hotmail crash and burn? I know it crashed and burned in a big way about that time frame...
That's not true. Take for example printers.
Did you try it yourself ? NT4 was stable. I crashed only 3 or 4 times in a full year on my computer. Don't make any claim about something you never tried.
Why "prior to SP6a" ?
You run the latest linux kernel, so why not be fair and use the latest SP6a ?
Of course moron the load balancer does not use the same OS as the webserver. Real load balancer from Cisco and others run their own internal OS. That's how it's done.
huh stupid these are used as desktop computer, so the user must have Admin rights on its own machine
while (1)
{
wget "http://www.slashdot.org/"
}
By the way why can't Slashdot convert CR to
tags, it's sucks to write those
when you want a new line.
I like how you put the link to Hotmail on the front page - Trying to slashdot 'em?
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
The only Spam my hotmail account has ever recieved is some I accidently got myself into. That's zdnet update, and gamezone stuff mostly and that it. It ads up to maybe 8 email a week.
Ahh, A nice legally binding electronic signature...
it could also be perl smart ass.
-- Did I just say something? --
otherwise, you'll end up with something you didn't expect and can't easily explain. check saturday's update for more: www.ridiculopathy.com
Classic case of Microsoft wanting to eat their own dog food.
:), they had so many problems migrating the servers to Microsoft but they got pushed through anyway. Too bad too. It just gave everyone more lasting headaches.
Microsoft pressures a lot of its partner companies to do the same. At a large CAD company )(auto something or other
In this article (from May 1, 1998), Microsoft says:
Rumors have surfaced regarding Hotmail's utilization of Solaris to run the Hotmail web based e-mail service and a failed attempt to port Hotmail to Microsoft® Windows NT® Server. These rumors are inaccurate and Microsoft and Hotmail would like to set the record straight by focusing on the facts.
but they also say:
Solaris is one of several operating systems in use. So is Windows NT Server.
Interesting...
Apparently they're using IIS 5.0 in their load balacing along with Apache HTTP/1.1 302 Redirected Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2000 15:28:17 GMT HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2000 15:28:28 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
I feel your pain.
Being that our company continues to "innovate" new solutions all the time
I would like to hear from you. Please email me at billyg@hotmail.com
Thank you,
BillyG
CEO Micro$haft hehe
You are an individual, just like everyone else.
Sig it.
Geez, somebody's a bit over-sensitive.
You cannot cover up the fact that the last time that Microsoft tried this little stunt, they failed miserably. Sure, maybe it's not exactly the height of "journalistic integrity" to allude to this laughable failure in the headline, but it's certainly relevant, particularly to those Slashdot readers who also happen to be Hotmail users. (If I was a Hotmail user, Yahweh knows that I would want to know about these plans ahead of time!)
Well, it _could_ go down if the Win2K machines were so bad that they slowed the whole network down; if, for example, they crashed a lot, causing random load increases on the BSD machines, or made the routers get confused, or whatever.
You do have a point, though - even if it's a moderately terrible decision, it should make Hotmail faster. It's only if it's a truly horrifyingly bad decision that Hotmail will get worse. ;)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
The nerd & tech folks at IBM really like the fact that the company is strongly supportive of linux, why? Because they love it and installed it at home. Effectively IBM is sponsoring an OS that is in competition to its own commercial product. It's likely the people at IBM are more in love with Linux than their own stuff - but whether such love can be found in redmond? I think that if the final figures would arrive on that one we wouldn't really be too amazed :)
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Exactly so I referred carefully to The nerd & tech folks at IBM :)
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Are you bill gates or just a troll?
Idle hands are the devil's workshop, but idle minds are much worse
But...
./ed... or even seem to sweat. By adding servers the load is balanced even better.
That additional 10% wouldn't buckle under the load right away, because they are *additional*, which was my point.
There was nothing in the story, besides the misleading title, to suggest that Hotmail was having load problems, or that any of the servers were stressed. I use Hotmail as a junk account and have never seen it
Like most MS products, it either had to be brought in from outside, or go though 3+ revisions to stabilize... Makes you wonder if they ever get any work done over there.
Yes, but the flip side of that is that everything MS does starts to look good after 3+ revisions. Apple, Borland, Corel and a lot of others have all made the mistake of thinking that because version 1 of an MS product was a joke, they could relax. NT and their server software are about to get another notch better.
I admit that I ran Win2000 for awhile. I was doing computational chemistry calculations, which maxed out the CPU, memory (400MB worth), and several GB of swap space for weeks on end. The OS never crashed (which NT4.0 did quite often). Note, however, that I had no other software (like office suites) installed. I've noticed that Windows can be rather stable until you actually try to install anything else on it. [if only we had liscenses for the linux version of the chemistry software; I bet things would have run much faster]
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
(-1 Dick)
(-1 Obvious Microsoft plant sent here to shame us into being objective)
it should be more publicized that microsoft doesn't use its own technology.
-Mogur
MS never made a real effort to move Hotmail to Windows prior to this conversion. That is a rumor that has been going around since they bought Hotmail, and it's not true.
Keep all the above comments in mind while posting a message of how slow Hotmail is....
Ahh yes.. and that solves the problem of your central datacenter going up in flames, how?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Tell me, what happens when that ONE S/390 dies from a hardware or other failure?
That's the whole point of clusters. Redundancy.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Apparently you don't understand the concept of "discardable" memory. This is memory that is being used, simply because nobody else is using it. Things like disk caches are good examples of this.
If you only have 3 megs of memory free, and you need 10. Discard 7 megs of the least recently used disk cache (which is what the OS will do) and free it up. No big deal. Things aren't swapped to disk when there is discardable memory available.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Oh, you've got to be kidding me. I post a genuine article with real facts (which were requested by the poster of the article) and I get moderated to a 0 with a Flamebait comment.
Does Slashdot want facts or not?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Ahh.. but we're not talking about "just a S/390" now. The system you describe is certainly going to cost about the same as Hotmails clustered systems. And 99.999 is a lot worse than 100%, which a clustered system can provide (since it's not running in the same physical hardware).
What happens if a meteor or airplane crash takes out your central data center? Clustered systems can exist in multiple locations.
What happens if your Power and backup fails to your ONE clustered device? With arrays, your power is likely coming from multiple sources.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I've not met a Un*x geek yet that would. Is BSD just so rock solid that these machines have been running themselves since M$ took over?
My experience with web serving with Win2K is that it's stable -- if you don't do anything really special with it. Given, however, that Microsoft has been working with Win2K for many months now (and therefore should be done doing anything specail to it), I suspect that their cluster dedicated to HotMail will be fairly stable -- why else would they have let people tell them "if Win2K is so great, why aren't you using it for Hotmail?" for the past 6 months? I suspect that they're as ready as they can be for the switch.
Of course, this is also the same company that let their domain registration of Hotmail.com expire, so saying "as ready as they can be" might not be saying much...
Quite frankly, I'll be much more impressed when they try this with search.microsoft.com -- last I looked, it was served by Apache.
Ah, the joy of posting anonymously. Microsoft has, since they first bought Hotmail, asked/demanded that they migrate to NT. However, the people in charge have known better. Many of the original Hotmail managers who knew better, however, have either moved on to better positions in other companies, or moved out of Hotmail into positions of responsbility over larger areas (like all of MS networking, etc).
No idea if this is why they're trying now, or if its just their corporate people coming down harder, but either way, I'm pretty sure this is the first time they've really tried.
For the Info, you can customize the header Apache returns when you send him a request. Go on Netcraft and check www.real.com. They are running Apache on Linux but as you can see that's not what they show on their Apache headers.
Actually, real.com is running on Roxen, not Apache.
Your point remains valid however, as they are having it return a custom identifier as you described.
--
You are wrong. :)
-
Most larger email systems use a so-called "2nd generation" MTA like qmail. Sendmail is basically monolithic and qmail is actually about 5 different processes. Processes for sending mail, recieving mail, etc. Postfix, Exim, and a few other also fall into this category, I believe. Postfix has been showing up in several Linux distro's due to their friendlier license then qmail. Source for Qmail is availible, but making changes availible in a commercial product has issues.
-
There's nothing really wrong with sendmail, it's just if you want to move LOTS of mail something a bit smaller and leaner is better.
Kashani, occasional qmail flunky
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
I would bet Hotmail sells the email addresses. Sure, I've given out my email address to several porn sites, but I've always been very sure to uncheck the box that says, "Subscribe me to the prono mailing list." (Everytime, I swear!) And still... I get porn spam! Egad, it must be Microsoft selling my Hotmail email addy....
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
OK, I'm all for Linux advocacy and stuff, but this is just plain silly. First of all, while you *can* run 40,000 instances of Linux on one mainframe, it doesn't mean it will be very useful. If you take the processing power of a mainframe and divide it by 40,000, you'll see that each virtual Linux box is much slower than a 386. (Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem. Other than that, it's more or less an ordinary 12-CPU box.)
Secondly, a cluster of x86 boxes will be an order of magnitude cheaper than a cluster of mainframes with equal processing power. Note that a single mainframe will NOT be able to handle all of the load. Ever heard of Beowulf? The guys that built Avalon (a Beowulf cluster of Alpha boxes) claim that it was over 6 times cheaper than a supercomputer from SGI with comparable performance.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Just a little historical perspective (as I recall it, correct me if I'm wrong):
Hotmail was NOT originally created by MS. When it was originally created, it was built on non Microsoft *nix type systems. Microsoft bought hotmail and shortly afterward investigated moving it to NT4.
During their testing they had a hard time getting NT4 boxes to handle the load of hotmail. I'd also say it is safe to assume that the existing hotmail code was written for, and tuned for *nix and not NT, meaning they would need at least some (and probably extensive) re-write to run well on NT. They probably could have moved it to NT at considerable expense, but given the cost and difficulty they decided to leave hotmail as-is. Even though leaving hotmail on *nix systems cost them some face (even MS couldn't get a large scale site to run on NT4), they still decided it would be better to leave well enough alone (for the time being).
Now they have a better (?) version of their flagship OS, and are taking another stab at moving hotmail onto their servers.
Not much of this seems very surprising..
-Matt
Seriously, not just to bash M$ (but that's always fun in its own easy way :-), how much of this is simply because it isn' necessarily compatible with NT4 and its multiple service packs? In other words, was NT 4 stable when it first started? Will W2K be more unstable in 2 or 3 years?
I don't run NT myself, in fact, I got my job partly because my resume said "No Windows experience and I don't want it" and the job ad said (in all caps) "MICROSOFT PROGRAMMERS NEED NOT APPLY". So this really is a curiosity question, with about as much serious content as wondering whether snakes prefer to eat rodents tail first or head first.
--
Infuriate left and right
How in the hell is your KDE using 180megs? are you sure you aren't counting used buffer memory against the totals? Also comparing the memory usage across the architectures is iffy at best. MSoft OS's don't usually report in the basic tools whats really being used (since they don't report caches).
F /...
---
Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
While we can laugh at Microsoft for trying to use the wrong tool for the job, its a great way to for them to test their own software.
Programming is always more efficient when the programmers use their own product. Isn't this why linux is where it is today?
Too bad no one at Microsoft tried living with the paper clip for two months before plaguing the world with it.
This shouldn't be a slashdot post, it should be a daily occurance.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
"Collapse under load" what are you talking about? Any chance of a link to anything that might substantiate that...?
come, now. many sites, including yahoo, have been taken out with ddos attacks. though a /. attack would not be quite as bad as a `real' ddos, they are quite similar.
=--- - - .
At one point, my sister created a Hotmail account. Being a bit of a technophobe, she only gave it to two friends in meatspace. After a month, it was full of spam - for pr0n sites. I have no idea how she managed to get onto pornspammers lists, but she did. Given that I doubt my sister is interested in looking at "cum-guzzling bitches" it seems a bit odd that she'd get that junk.
I had the same problem. I created a throwaway account for use on a particular mailing list (I wanted to be able to post stuff semi-anonymously) but never actually did anything with it.
A couple of months later I come back to Hotmail and I had 70 porn ads in it. I never gave anyone the address, let alone used it for anything!
Did anyone actually look at Hotmail's Terms of Service to determine wahther or not they reserve the right to sell your Hotmail account?
Jay (=
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/hotmail.html
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Ah, you got the Apache servers that they changed the "Server:" line on to say "Microsoft-IIS/5.0" :-)
Well, if your mailing list was archived publically, then your address might have been picked up by spam-spiders or whatever.
I've seen mailing list programs which archive the messages changing myname@example.com to "myname at example dot com", which should be a decent deterant. I've also seen (in HTMLGen for Python, though I'm sure it's used elsewhere) replacing random letters from the email address with the HTML escape sequence, so that it looks perfectly normal to a person using a web browser but as text it's not a valid email (which will work until spider programs replace the escape sequences, which perhaps they do already).
I wrote a newsgroup-email-sucker-thing one time (for educational purposes only!); it was I think 16 lines of Python, not coded very well, a single thread of execution, and it still nabbed around 6000 addresses per hour (extrapolated; I didn't run it that long).
Check your internet connection. This edit page opened in about 1 second. I can't tell you in advance how long it'll take to post, but I'll reply to myself if it's over a minute :-)
Before we all start saying "Hotmail's going to die! Win2K can't handle the load!", let's wait and see what happens. We may be surprised: perhaps MS has finally started getting it right. Perhaps Win2K *can* handle the load. Right now, we simply don't know.
What we do know is that the Apache/BSD combo is very capable of doing the job. We can use that as evidence to convince the pointy-haired types of the validity of Linux/BSD/Apache as reliable tools, even though they're free.
I'm very interested to see the end results. Can Win2K handle the load? Is its reliability finally on par with *NIX? Will Marsha ever love again? (Uh... nevermind...)
I am a huge fan of Linux and BSD. I hate the crap that comes out of Redmond. However, I'm also a firm believer in "the best tool for the job." If Linux is the best, use it. If Windows does what you need, use it.
Those of us in the IT field aren't being paid for our prejudices for or against particular operating systems. We're paid to get the stuff to work right at the highest level of efficiency and reliability.
I'm very interested to see what the end results of this move are going to be.
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
Hotmail about to collapse under load
I know other people have complained about the headline, but jeez guys, what kind of crummy and misleading sensationalism is that? Not to mention wishful thinking. Grow up.
Yeah! And when they move the network to mostly Windows machines, let's all hit www.hotmail.com and sign up for an account -- all at the same time. Then we'll see just how well Windows 2000 can stand the heat! :-)
My journal has hot
First, you can look at these numbers two ways - either W2K is better -or- the productivity numbers come from it being worse. For example, "Since we installed W2K, our productivity has increased 5%. We have found that the web browser crashes so often our sales force spends 5% less time surfing the web."
These numbers are very meaningless to me. They remind me of ads for things like the Splitfire spark plug that "increases your gas mileage 15%!". Funny thing is that your gas mileage varies by 15% constantly. In other words, snake oil.
Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem.
Yes, and just what do you suppose the machines in a web/email site like Hotmail spend most of their time doing? Fast Fourier transforms? I don't think so.
-- Alastair
Where 100% uptime is critical, you get two mainframes and put them in different locations, obviously.
I've seen mainframe datacenters supplied with power from two different transformer substations, and with a roomful of battery backups and a standby generator, just in case of potential power outages.
I've worked one place where a key corporate system was hosted on a Sun Enterprise 1000 system, or rather two of them, one in Denver, one in Dallas, with the database replicated between the two via a dedicated OC3 line.
When you get a situation like that described at Hotmail where you've got admins employed full-time just assembling new boxes and adding them to the clusters to keep up with growth (to say nothing of running around rebooting/repairing failed boxes), you're in a situation where the savings on admin costs alone will pay for another mainframe.
-- Alastair
I vaguely recall that, when Hotmail had a partial outage and customer data loss a couple of months back, I jokingly commented that they were trying to cut over to Windows again.
Maybe it wasn't a joke. The news stories quoted an automated response from the overworked complaint desk, and the gist of the response was that "we're doing something that's going to improve your service".
Did anyone hear the cause of the outtage and data loss? Does anyone know when they started putting W2K in?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The real news in the Netcraft article, which no one seems to be mentioning, is that Linux now runs 30% of the WWW.
Moreover, that 30% makes Linux #1. So far as I know, this is the first time this fact has been announced to the public. (And the public might well be surprised, considering how hard Gartner and IDC have been trying to play down Linux's successes in server space.)
Netcraft also reports that the agregate of all types of Windows runs 28.3% of the Web; Solaris, 16.3%; the ever-popular "other" runs 23.6%; and a couple of percent are left over as "unknown".
Hopefully they will now start reporting it over time, so that we can get nice trend plots like we do for Apache.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
BSD > BSOD
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
Remind me again why having free memory is a good thing? You pay lots of money for fast RAM, then... don't use it? The reason you have memory is so you can do things with it. It's the sign of a good operating system to use all the resources available. Using spare memory to cache graphics objects (which I'm guessing KDE does) is a good use of free memory. Bloat is different than resource usage.
The problem is when your customers have trouble using your web site because of flakey software. I see far more weird errors on www.microsoft.com than on other web sites. They seem to have a policy of using all of the latest Microsoft bells and whistles, whether they work reliably or not.
Wow, you have one whole data point. That's enough to draw all sorts of conclusions from.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
You are afc, and I want my $5.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I gaurentee this is not what is happening. How do i know? I work for Hotmail. I'm on the front lines. I know what's going on. And this is not what is happening. That i gaurentee.
I am not sure where Slashdot got this, but the title is completly misleading. There is a transition of SOME of the servers from BSD to Win2k, but that load is stable, and is not a source of problems. It is a gradual change, and a hotmail user won't even notice the difference.
at least get your headline right.
----------------
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
Geez, what, is everybody on Slashdot a programmer? Where are all the SAs and NAs? Hotmail has been going beserk lately, and Microsoft has been contacting most of the major providers to try and dampen their mail to Hotmail. Hotmail has actually been bulk rejecting mail from some of the largest mailing lists on the net recently. New York's Silicon Alley Daily has a story about how they shut down all mails from 24/7 media's Exactis. Exactis is one of the largest mailing list companies, so all of their customers (including SAD) were affected. The latest attempt to migrate Hotmail has been a nightmare, just like the last time.
At least this time they're taking it slow, a few servers at a time, rather than just pulling the plug on the old boxes. Before we write off Hotmail, let's see how Win2K handles it. Everyone I've talked to who's used Win2K has found it to be significantly faster and more reliable than NT4. They may be able to pull this off - I suspect these 5%-10% will be used to work out the kinks before migrating the whole service.
It's a very long, painful debate on the OpenBSD forums - go to the archives there and have a read.
:-)
Basically, Theo and his team auditted the OpenBSD version of sendmail and are happy with it security-wise. Add that to the fact that it's the industry standard and they're happy to keep it.
Also, qmail has a very very restrictive license that the BSD people are probably not happy with (they aren't really allowed to patch the source code and distribute it as 'qmail' in a binary package, which isn't acceptable).
Still, the first thing I do on my OpenBSD installs is to kill sendmail and install qmail from ports
Actually, I think the title meant that Hotmail is going to collapse under its load soon, ("about to"), since it's switching to Win2k.
ahhhh. Cute humor, too bad it was badly phrased ;)
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
OK, maybe I'm too bored at work right now...
There's just no internal pressure to create system that's perfectly usable by a non-admin.
There has been a mixture of facts and distortions in these threads.
Hotmail has several different kinds of machines. For purposes of this article, there are three kinds:
1) Solaris boxes used for storing the email, basically huge local file servers
2) A mix of NT and FreeBSD Intel boxes used as "front doors", i.e. the things that render the pages.
3) FreeBSD Intel boxes for the rest (the plumbing of the email application, ad server, incoming email, etc.)
The article, I assume, is talking about the front doors. This is not the bulk of Hotmail, although they are the ones that handle the connections (after the load balancer, of course).
Hotmail represents a lot of practical learning about how to maintain and build scale. They add clusters in units of groups of the three types of machines noted above. This simplifies management and expenses, as well as technical issues.
Microsoft is, of course, interested in moving the front doors to Windows 2000 as a scalability and management test. They have run Windows NT 4 on them in the past and learned from that. I doubt the interior machines of Hotmail will use Windows 2000 without a significant and extremely costly redesign -- unlike the front doors, there is significant non-portable code involved.
My information comes from having done an analysis of Hotmail at Microsoft, where I was chief architect until 1999.
I ran the same experiment, but used www.hotmail.com for the hostname rather than the one that you selected (how did you come up with that one?)
You're scanning the login page - he's scanning the cluster which handles the inbox, composition, posting, etc etc. The actual email servers.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
You only get redirected after login; and that "one address" (the law one) would appear to be running both Apache and IIS SIMULTANEOUSLY depending on when you ping it. So it's obviously a subcluster.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I setup a hotmail account long ago just to get my /. login. I've never posted that address anywhere else, and I rarely even check the mail there. But I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be? Either /. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.
Or you got a "recycled" account with the name already on a spammers list. Or your email address happens to be one someone else uses as a "mangled" name, etc, etc
I started a new yahoo account to never use... 6 months later (never posting it anywhere or using it) I had ~10-20 spams/month (total over 100)... good stuff!
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Get your facts straight. That's not the MSN homepage. That's the host that carries MSN members homepages.
www.msn.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
I use my hotmail account a lot (to protect my work account) and have lately noticed a number of SPAMs to me, from me. I know the headers are forged, but that's abuse!
No please don't take printers. An off the shelf HP laserjet 6 caused the machine to lock up every third print job. An off the shelf DELL with an ATI rage card randomly rebooted itself several times a day. Eventually I was able to get beta drivers for both and now it just randomly reboots every other day or so if you are lucky. I am still waiting for tested, signed officially OKed drivers from DELL or ATI but it might take a couple of months.
Oh yea installing Interbase Version 6.0 also killed the system!. The OS let the installer overwrite a crucial system DLL. WhooHoo all it takes to take down W2K is a DLL with a wrong timestamp.
Nothing changes the same old crap in a new packaging. I really should know by now what to expect from MS.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
The good news is that after 20 years of inoovation microsft was finally able to include a telnet server in windows. It just shows what innovation can do.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
It takes microsoft to sell a technological improvement as "increasing sales force productivity". I wonder if when we upgrade here, our sales productivity will go up too :)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Microsoft SHOULD buy back their shares of Xenix, and run freeBSD on that.
I'm an idiot. I meant to say run HOTMAIL on that, not FreeBSD. My mind gets numb at 5pm.
Microsoft SHOULD buy back their shares of Xenix, and run freeBSD on that.
[snicker]
Or they could mix it with Windows 2003 (Code named WinOSX) and then build a special API called.. Saqua to beef up their GUI.
Either way, buying back Xenix would be a great move for MS. (-:
I don't know if it's related, but recently I've been getting a HELL of a lot more "Oops, server encountered an internal server error" and "404 - Document not found" errors when attempting to access my hotmail account. I only use Hotmail for my CS Clan stuff, but I check it a couple of times a day. During the past week or so, ever 2nd access (either login in, attempting to view/reply to a message, moving mail, etc) results in some form of error being spewed at me. Prior to this I had no problems. Coincidence? I think not.
Enable the feature, wait untill it blocks something from the listserver, go into 'Bulk Mail', select a message from the listserver and select 'this is not bulk mail'. It won't block anything from that address again.
I think the Bulk Mail feature is excellent. On average in a month I get about 2 spam mailings and I have had my hotmail address for at least 4-5 years now and use it as my primary address.
I believe you meant "Watch for impending Hotmail collapse" as M$ tries to shift the load over to another OS. Really guys, your title contradicted your posting.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Every megabyte of unused memory in your system means that you're paying for memory you never use.
That's why, historically, unix or linux runs with so little *free* memory, because it tries to cache as much of the drive as possible. Read caches can be thrown away painlessly; just zero-fill the pages and pass them to the program. Dirty pages need to be written, but 'updated' flushes them to disk after 30 seconds.
True, that disk cache might not have much of a hit rate, but if the memory isn't needed for anything else, and it might save adozen disk hit's, what's the point in not using it?
So, yeah, The system I'm on now has 256mb, with: 2mb for the kernel, 4mb free, 145mb buffer, 34mb cache, 7mb on swap, leaving about 70mb being spent on programs and other misc.. I'm not quite sure where it's going, and I suspect that a lot of it is flushable. (I'm not on it locally, so there's no X/enlightenment, just squid, netscape, xemacs, apache, and some xterms.)
Let's be fair, after all it's gotta be pretty hard work keeping all those security flaws up and running... :)
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
My fibre optic fractional T1 opened the edit page in less than a second. It took about 3 seconds to load the list of comments ranked over '2' but that was mostly CPU usage.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
T1 used to infer DS1 over copper. T1 is both a protocol and a speed reference now. T1 is commonly used to refer to the standard 1.54 meg abit speed it offers. Those of us in the industry long enough now just refer to 'fractional T1' when refering to partial megabit divisions of bandwidth ... as they were when I used copper at all.
Note: PC Webopedia T1 Definition for a not-too-bad reference.
Also cf. the T1 standards committee for the picky version, and specifically T1E1, the standards committee for "consideration and development of optical, electrical and mechanical characteristics of interfaces".
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Either /. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.
Try making one and not giving it to anyone and you'll still find spam. I'm guessing hotmail has some security problems, I can almost picture the underpaid tech support guy who habitually fills zip disks with fresh new addresses and sells them to spammers.
I set up a hotmail account to test a problem someone was having recieving mail from hotmail, and I kept getting internal server errors. I think that they should concentrate on fixing their software before they try to fix something that's not actually broken. Silly.
Being bored I wrote a script to monitor this ratio continuously. The example below monitors the average over the last 500 request (one request max. per 10s). After some hours of running this I still get (like others) around 5%. I'll track this some days to see if anything changes.
:).
Hmm, if lots of people are going to do this (removing the sleep 10) that might really cause even Hotmail to be slashdotted
#!/bin/ksh
let i=0
let ms=0
let ap=0
while true;
do
if [[ ${v[i]} = "ms" ]]; then
let ms=ms-1
fi
if [[ ${v[i]} = "ap" ]]; then
let ap=ap-1
fi
server=$(lynx -head -dump http://www.hotmail.com/ |grep Server)
if (print $server|grep Microsoft >/dev/null); then
v[i]="ms"
let ms=ms+1
else
v[i]="ap"
let ap=ap+1
fi
print $ms out of $((ms+ap)), $(print "2k 100 $ms * $ms $ap + / p" | dc) %
let i=i+1
if [[ i -eq 500 ]]; then
let i=0
fi
sleep 10
done
There are MANY sites on the net that get far more traffic than hotmail (the MSN homepage for instance) and they handle the load just fine. Doesn't that make you think?
It makes me think it's not a windows box, and ya know what (I'm right): Solaris with Apache
Just Role With It.
Slashdot just went for about 5 minutes. Sensationalism, then hypocrisy?
win2k is better under a load than nt 4.0. I use win2k at work, at an asp programming job, and i find that the win2k server crashes less frequently and is a bit faster.
Apache is a great web server. But the fact is it's not as fast as win2k with iis, as proven by some impartial surveys, nevermind the mindcraft one. Even companies who do mostly linux and test the servers can't get apache to server more quickly.
Hotmail's bulk filtering system isn't set up to let you recieve mail from legitamate e-mailing lists, unless (1) mailing list daemon is set up to make it seem like each e-mail is addressed to you, or (2) the mailing list is run by hotmail or a partner site. Since I'm on several majordomo lists, I can't use this feature without blocking a lot of e-mail that I want to recieve.
(Sorry if I sound like I'm attacking the person I'm replying to. I'm just slightly frustrated at Hotmail for promoting this as a spam blocking feature without making it work correctly, and somewhat suspicious about it since I started getting lots of spam right around the time this feature was added.)
From hotmail:
Use Inbox Protector to direct incoming e-mail to your Inbox if it is:
- E-mail addressed directly to you (i.e., e-mail in which you appear on the "To:" or "Cc:" line)
- WebCourier Subscription services and Hotmail member letters
[checkbox] E-mail from all trusted Hotmail and Passport users.
[checkbox] Content from Microsoft and MSN.
[checkbox] E-mail from all Passport partner sites.
Also, direct mail from these addresses and/or domains to my Inbox. (Be sure to use either spaces or commas to separate entries.)
[textarea]
All other e-mail will be sent to your Bulk Mail folder. Bulk Mail folder content is emptied 30 days after delivery, while Trash Can folder content is emptied several times a week to help you stay under your disk quota.
The shareholder is always right.
And if you don't particularly want to be a beta tester, maybe you shouldn't use a giant, unruly, insecure, slow, free e-mail account as your primary mail provider. Sheesh.
This is what has always killed me about the hotmail bitching.
People have screamed, stomped, and threatened to sue for losing important email, loss of business, etc....
Hotmail? For important business accounts? What kind of drugs are these people on?
Or gone.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Bah, that's nothing. You want spam? Comcast @Home will show you what spam really means. 3 months ago I ordered a cable modem so I could telecommute (there's something about a newborn baby that makes one want to stay home from work).
The cable technician arrived at 10am, and had to drill some holes, finished up around noon. I reconfigure my email client and take a look -- the first spam advert arrived at 11am!!! I could not even use the cable yet, but I had already received junk mail.
I still have to check it every now and then, just to "Select All, Delete" so the accumulated mail doesn't cut into my disk quota.
To all those who say "Slashdot FUD", I ask "Do you expect Slashdot not to have any bias?". Slashdot is pro-Open Source, everybody knows that, and it's OK with me. I see the title more as a "joke" or a way to catch the attention. FUD is when you try to look fair, but in fact mislead the reader. This is clearly not the case.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
So let's figure out when they put them all in the pool, and slashdot them!
while (1)
{
wget "http://www.hotmail.com"
}
-ted
=====
Why "prior to SP6a" ?
You run the latest linux kernel, so why not be fair and use the latest SP6a ?
=====
The original poster wanted to act as if NT's stack was the "old rock of stability", I wanted to counter this by showing that any stability it has is reasonably new. SP6a's stack fixes do seem to address most if not all of the issues but to have to wait until the middle of 1999 for a stable stack definitely earns a "this sucks" seal for NT.
I see that my post has earned the description of "flamebait". That is absurd, I know very little about linux/unix, I am an NT administrator for an ISP. This isn't flamebait, it's facts about issues that I am forced to deal with on a daily basis.
maru
..disguised as a slashdot headline! Ingenious!
Back on topic: Eating ones own dogfood is worthy of respect. Chow down, boys and girls.
The only site that I can think of that would really get more traffic then Hotmail is Yahoo. And even with that, Hotmail is not just running a "hey look at this" site, but has to handle billions of pieces of mail a day, which I think would make it very obviously more complicated to run than a site where all they do is send data one way.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
From here: Hotmail does not condone or support the sending of junk e-mail (aka "spam") through our system. The Hotmail Terms of Services (TOS) strictly forbids sending unsolicited e-mail and we terminate all reported accounts that are in violation of the TOS. If you do receive unsolicited e-mail, report it to abuse@hotmail.com. Remember to include a complete copy of the message, including the full message headers. Have you tried this?
The setup they are going to is w2k and IIS. They are currently running off of dual proc boxes with apache 1.something, the backend is (and will remain) on solaris. They have done quite a bit of testing that has produced results showing that w2k will be able to handle more traffic. My guess is that they just have winblows 2k and IIS set up to use the second proc more effeciently.
MS owns Hotmail. They want to advertise how wonderful their products are, i.e. IIS, 2000, NT, etc.
Why don't they run Hotmail on their own OS and software? Why don't they eat their own dogfood?
This makes zero sense. You would think that every trade publication would have asked this question at least once.
Why they don't run on their own platform and why people keep buying their products in light of this is a mystery to me.
Check out the story here
If, and this is purely hypothetical and would never happen, if Windows 2000 was a total resource hog and, due to its extreme bloat, staggered around like a drunken boar with a hip replacement, you could have 10% of the servers running W2k, however, they might only be serving, say, half as fast as a lighter, more reasonable operating system, due to reboots, bloat, inefficient code, checking to see if you are running Netscape's browser so it could serve to you just a little slower, and so forth.
Again, purely hypothetical. Nothing to see here folks, move along!
Umm... so what is this story I hear about www.microsoft.com running on 1000+ NT boxes?
And the other story about the biggest single day download in 97 from www.cdrom.com was 480Gigs and the biggest single day download in the same year from www.microsoft.com was 380Gigs, and how cdrom.com was _ONE_ dual cpu Ppro with 2 Gigs of ram whereas microsoft.com was 40+ similar machines?
And what about the story about etoys being very happy with their NT servers until christmas time, when it will fall over every 45 seconds. As an interim solution, they went out and bought more servers, stuck them behind the hotfailover proxy, and survived christmas that way?
Lets see, it takes 3 minutes to reboot, it falls over in 45 secs, I will need... hmm... 5 servers. www.dell.com/INEEDMYSERVERSNOWDAMNIT
-the_b0fh
It's too bad netcraft doesn't know the number of win 2000 boxes added in relation to the BSD boxes already there. It would be interesting to see the raw perfermance ratios of win 2000 versus BSD in such a heavily loaded system, and I certainly think hotmail would qualify.
This must be a very stressfull time for the employees at Microsoft. They are always very optimistic in their marketing with regards to the abilities of Win2000 and now they must put their product where their marketing is. Sure we enjoy poking fun at MS, and most of the time they have it coming, but we should remember that their are real humans working their who are just like you and I.
I would guess that many of the engineers read some of the marketing stuff thay comes from the marketing department and just shake their heads. Yet these are the guys who have to cash the check that the marketing department writes. Probably very frustrating at times. So now if they do have trouble keeping hotmail up with Win2000 servers, well... I would not want to have to be the programmers sitting in on that meeting...
:)
Ok, to clear some things up.... I have a good friend who works at Hotmail as a Net Admin over there. We were both reading over these posts and I was listening to all the comments he had about it. Just to inform /. there are currently over 70 Million users with an estimated 110 Million accounts at hotmail. These fluctuate about 5-15 Million each day as the inactive ones are turned off. The system there is divided into "Clusters" each cluster having about 400 machines. There are about 12 clusters there, which mean about 4,800 machines. My friend informs me that an estimated 75% of the Clusters are now running Win2K with IIS, as well as serving many of the DNS requests. Hotmail adds around 300,000 new accounts each day. They have to build new clusters as fast as they can to keep up with the demand. Yes the BSD and Win2K machines are working together. The hardest thing there is the actual conversion... it is a bit tricky I am sure. But they are all running quite well. From time to time you may see a delay in the response time... and yes you may even get errors... I would LOVE to find an Administer who can convert 4800 machines from one OS to another and have 0 down time. Yup Unix is great... serves a great purpose and does a great job with it. On the other hand so does the MS OS's... I work for an IT outsourcing company and would hate to think of Administering all of our clients if they were running Unix instead of Windows... Oh and at anytime Hotmail has 'Capacity' to run for a few days at the current load... meaning they are having to add machines and clusters as fast as they can because of all the increased volume/new users... this has been the case for years... yes EVEN with BSD. So yeah BSD is nice... but seems like MS is doing a great job of using it's own products.
I worked with Hotmail and Microsoft for a while and can tell you they've been working on getting everything to Windows for quite a while. They were working on designing just about everything so they could port it over, however hotmail has a *LOT* of proprietary code, 'databases', servers, meta-servers, frontdoor code, etc, so it has obviously taken some time. I expect the change to happen soon.
"HotMail has commenced its much awaited migration to a Microsoft operating system. Some Windows 2000 machines have recently been moved into the load balancing pool, with currently between 90-95% of requests being served by the established FreeBSD/Apache platform, and 5-10% from Windows 2000. The Hotmail site infrastructure is enormous, and even if everything runs smoothly, a migration will likely take several weeks."
I'm not sure why several people have gone off on /. for attributing this story to an AC, saying that it's FUD, or that /. is about to collapse under bias..
C'mon folks, this is what Netcraft has said; /. is merely quoting them.
Click on the link and go read it, and deal with it..
It's about a third of the way down the page, under Around the Net
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I went to Netcraft's site and this was the response back from a request to Hotmail.
www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on Windows 2000
I am not one to jump to conclusions but something strange seems to be going on (or is it just me). Unix version of Apache on Windows 2000????
Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this one.
It's quite simple actually. The machine that accepts the TCP connection (the load balancer) forwards it on to one of a pool of webservers. Sometimes also called reverse proxying. Obviously the load balancer and the webservers do not need to run the same OS, as you see in this example.
--
bgphints - internet routing news, hints and ti
I wonder if the login server isn't different from the actual mail servers? Hotmail does, after all, immediately push you to one of their law.hotmail.msn.com servers. That was my assumption, though perhaps flawed, when I used the lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com address. Is anybody familiar with their topology?
Anyhow, I repeated the experiment, this time on lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com, which is the server that www.hotmail.com pushes to. My numbers there more closely matched yours:
4.7% W2K. That's closer the the results that I'd *like* to see.
-Waldo
-------------------
if one can install it and get it up and running quickly like a business machine should that'd be great - altho for 200 servers that comes to, mmmm, $660,000 (zowie!). If I have to start putzing around trying to trick it to work, read thick manuals, grep TechNet for workarounds and edit registry keys then I'd just rather use an open platform in the first place - at least it *worth* learning, and isn't just BG's flavor on the month that will be obsolete, useless knowledge in the next cycle - e.g., I'm glad I didn't commit much time to learning NT security domains, other than just enough to get by and get paid, now that there's a completely different system in 2K.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
> their most successful net service has been running on Unix since day one.
That's not quite true. They did attempt to convert to NT once before, but it failed under the load.
That's the justification for the headline.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
it doesn't say how many w2k boxes are being used to replace the BSD boxes. if they're putting in 400 w2k machines in place of 200 BSD ones, of course it will prolly work, but that isn't much of a reason for using w2k.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
The question is whether it's cost effective for customers to deploy Windows 2000 in that way. There are several components to the cost:
So, can it be done? Sure. And Microsoft needs to do it if they want to play at all. But it is not a convincing demonstration that it's a cost-effective solution.
If I were to start another big web project, I'd still not pick Windows 2000--except for niche server applications, I believe it's still too expensive to license the required MS and non-MS software, and it requires too much manpower to administer. It also doesn't have any place to grow right now: a multiprocessor Xeon is it.
Actually, it shows us one thing: the fact that Microsoft has been playing around with this for, what, three years, suggests that you can't easily create the software for a Hotmail-like service rom scratch and with complete specifications on the NT platform within that time period even if you have unlimited amounts of money and all the Windows expertise in the world. Perhaps that's the most important lesson of that exercise, and something aspiring web startups should take note of.
I ran the same experiment, but used www.hotmail.com for the hostname rather than the one that you selected (how did you come up with that one?)
My results:
240 Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
15 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
94% Apache, 6% IIS. Much closer to the 5% numbers quoted in the article.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
Although everyone here will go "it'll never work" or "it'll fail instantly", my experience with Windows 2000 is that, if properly set up, it can be quite a stable platform. We should all be watching closely, since this will be a real test to see whether Windows 2000 can meet or exceed an equivalent UNIX+Apache system.
Taral
WARN_(accel)("msg null; should hang here to be win compatible\n");
-- WINE source code
Adding nodes can only make the system faster, regardless of whether the new nodes are Windows or BSD
... if 10% of the machines suddenly buckle under the load, but in such a way as to escape automatic removal, then 10% of URL requests will die mysteriously.
Definitely not true. If the additional machines are significantly slower and/or unreliable, then you destabilise the overall quality of service of Hotmail.
Think about it
This is a pretty positive move from Microsoft's point of view though - after that initial burp, they've been very careful from a system integration point of view, and seem to be quite sane about the way they are migrating to 2000 now.
Well, MySQL is MySQL, but I find its being used for many projects which I think is totally inappropriate. I mean anything above the most simple site which is done as a hobby, I think MySQL is not good enough... what happens when your RDBMS fall down go boom? I find Ramus's explination why he thinks Foreign Key's are "bad" just too funny for words (ok, not quite, but still quite funny).
I'd like to point out that I think MySQL has a niche, but I think people are using MySQL in many places outside of that niche, and that takes away energy from more worthy projects ie: PostgreSQL.
Yes, There are many sites I'd suggest MySQL over Oracle, but I wouldnt use MySQL for a site I was paid to do ever again.
Sendmail would crumble under that kind of load. Hotmail, rather sanely, uses qmail for outgoing deliveries. Here's the Message-ID from a mail I received from a friend who uses Hotmail:
<20000428205548.12433.qmail@hotmail.com>
Note the qmail part.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
I was a consultant at an online yellow pages company from 1998->2000.
Our director of engineering and one of the VPs were courted by Microsoft in late 1998 or early 1999 to consider using Windows NT to serve our pages and do our directory searches.
As evidence of Microsoft's ability to handle large loads, they were shown racks upon racks of rack-mounted NT boxes. Hundreds of boxes. The idea being that when some fall over, there are plenty to take up the load.
Our VP was told that these machines were to be the new Hotmail servers.
The director and VP came back to town all excited and wanted us to look into getting rid of our pesky Sun Enterprise boxes.
About a month after they got back, we showed them an article about Microsoft's failed conversion of Hotmail to NT, and how they had to roll back to FreeBSD and Apache.
to see how the story worked out, check out what your Directory EXpert is using today.
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
I used wget 1,000 times and checked the "Server" header. Only 61 of these requests were processed by IIS servers.
This suggests that the 10% figure that's been thrown around is (from an MS standpoint) very optimistic. 5-6% seems much more reasonable.
They also simply try randomly every single combination of letters and numbers, up to arround 5 letters, more then that would take too long.
So in short, when you create a hotmail address make it long, and don't use words from the dictionary and you won't get too much spam.
-Ariel
By using those 41,500 Linux servers on one S/390 mainframe... that I bought for $45.00 - that's how :)
Or, I could convince people to join team slashdot at distributed.net for sending ping of deaths to hotmail just as M$ finishes switching over to Winblows!
Just me and my beowulfed slashdot community
- passion
$lynx -head -dump http://lc5.law5.hotmail.passport.com/cgi-bino
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 18:37:33 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Mon, 01 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: BrowserTest=Success%3f; domain=.passport.com; path=/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
$
"Widget choice makes me horny." -
If BSD is replaced, the BSD doesn't win.
We're all presuming that Win2k will take at least double the servers to handle the same load. So while Microsoft will claim victory, they're (presumably) paying a BUNCH of money for hardware for this showcase. So (presumably) MS doesn't win, either.
Margins are so small on computing hardware that the the boxmaker doesn't win, either. Once upon a time, the CPU and hard drive were the only really profitable parts. Given hard drive price erosion, lately, is that list down to the CPU? In that case, Intel emerges as the only clear winner in this whole thing. (I presume these are not AMD CPUs they're fielding.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Not to say that an NT-based system will auction best the Linux and FreeBSD's of the world, but from what I've seen (despite the still extraorbinant-price MS charges) it's a pretty good, very reliable system.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
$ lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/n
HTTP/1.1 302 Redirected
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 18:32:24 GMT
Location: http://lc5.law5.hotmail.passport.com/cgi-bin/logi
$
I'm sure there'll be a lot of sneering here but Microsoft has a good habit of eating their own dog food. In the early days of NT, they started using it internally as much as possible. They had a slow, buggy email system that lost a lot of their mail -- but NT and their servers got better. I've read that Solaris only started to get really usable when Sun forced their engineers to use it instead of SunOS.
Maybe if Motorola hadn't gotten rid of all their Macs they'd have improved the G4 in the last year.
1. It will fail miserably, and the BSD community will cry *SEE! WE'RE BETTER!* and it will disappear in the mists of time. How many MCSE's do you know that talk openly about the previous Hotmail efforts? None, that I know, anyway.
Or,
2. It will succeed, tremendously, and then MS will use it as a massive PR campaign, how they replaced the "superior" BSD. The other side (thats us, I guess) will grumble "yeah, with double the number of machines/many times the cost/lots of effort/etc" and we'll go back to telling the boss that its NT and not Samba.
Or,
3. It will be a partial success, MS will Service Pack and Hotfix away, and both sides will claim victory, anyway.
But you already knew that.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I setup a hotmail account long ago just to get my /. login. I've never posted that address anywhere else, and I rarely even check the mail there. But I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be? Either /. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.
Anyway, back ontopic: I just went and tried to get in. It took SEVERAL seconds to load each page. That's slower than I've ever seen it. And don't tell me it's the Slashdot Effect--something the size of hotmail should handle that.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Consider it a failure of MySQL ;-)
;-(
heh, yes, I'm rabidly anti-mysql, and after studying the mysql docs for many years and seeing how the mysql guys do things, I've decided they are fucked in the head to put it mildly. They've decided that 20 years+ of RDBMS research is just plain wrong and decided that table-level locks is the way to go and that transactions are not a good way to do things. Not to mention that foreign keys are just a hassle...
I wouldnt mind so much except everyone's pushing MySQL as a oracle-replacement! I mean jeez, sure its fast... as long as you keep your concurrency low...
which brings me to the last point, slashdot is slow because they're using mysql, the table concurrency is killing them... they used to generate the static-comment page once a minute with a little daemon thingy because they couldnt get performance from multiple-readers and multiple-writers to the same table.
FUCK!
Its like the last 20 years of good research and hard work hasn't ever happened... the multiple-readers/writers with good performance problem has been licked so many times, that its just sad to see software which still cant get it right...
ok.
bye for now.
I've seen a couple of comments here suggesting that Hotmail be slashdotted. How the hell are you going to accomplish this? How many users is Hotmail up to now? Last I heard it was over 40 million....how do you figure the couple of hundred thousand (that's being VERY generous) /. readers are even going to make Hotmail's servers even hiccup? You'd have about as much luck as /.-ing Yahoo...
I went to Netcraft's site and this was the response back from a request to Hotmail.
www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on Windows 2000
I am not one to jump to conclusions but something strange seems to be going on (or is it just me). Unix version of Apache on Windows 2000????
Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this one.
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2.) NT (not to mention 2k) can handle just as many hits as Solaris, or any other Unix platform. This has been shown time and time again, but people seem to like to ignore facts and concentrate on a three year old story about poorly written back end code
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This is flat out untrue. NT particularly has, time and time again, shown itself to have a feeble TCP stack that buckles under load. I am not talking about the "lets slam it with a zillion connections for 15 minutes" tests. Show me a high trafficked NT box that has been up for longer than 60 days, particularly prior to SP6a. The Microsoft solution is clustering, that way when one of the machines craps out after being up for a week, it can be rebooted without affecting site availability. The NT stack (Win 2K inclusive) is just now, within the last 12 months, starting to achieve acceptable levels of reliability. I guess it's better late than never, but don't act like the reputation is unwarranted.
maru
The real problem IMHO is that Microsoft has nothing that even remotely compares to Sendmail. Without a world-class SMTP server(and Sendmail is the only one that I know of) I just don't see how they could handle a project of this magnitude.
I know there is a Sendmail for NT, but is it as solid and reliable as the UNIX version? My experience working with SMTP on NT tells me it wouldn't be, because it doesn't integrate with the OS as nicely as it does with UNIX. Correct me if I'm wrong.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I'm willing to bet that 5-10% of the mail doesn't get through! ;)
Here is the Link
Hetz (Heunique)
#!/bin/bash
i=1
while [ "$i" -lt 253 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>
let i="$i"+1
done
I got the following results:
- 202 "Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b"
- 798 "Microsoft-IIS/5.0"
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Microsoft's load-balancing setup, or if I skewed the results in any way as a result of my choice of server. So I reproduce all data here.-Waldo
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I wouldn't be so smug: Slashdot just spent 92 seconds opening this edit page. Before that I waited almost three minutes for the article page with comments to load. And before that, I was surfing in directly to a specific single comment from an external link -- that never opened at all. I finally gave up on that window.
I'm sure Linux/Apache (or whatever you guys are running on over here, I don't follow that gossip) does have an overall stability edge over Redmond product, but NT was never the joke it's made out to be around here and 2000 is even more competitive.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
If it proves that Win2k and BSD can cooperate in the same environment, even temporarily. Think about it. All along we've been trying to convince businesses to introduce Linux/BSD into their computing environments. What better ammunition to use on them than this?
"But boss, Microsoft is doing it..."
Visit the
Am I reading the right page, because I don't see anything about Hotmail about to collapse under load. Can we please try to stay away from catchy but misleading news titles?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Let's get some facts straight.
1.) The reason Hotmail crapped out the first time in 1997 on NT was not because it couldn't handle the 10mil + users, but because the software was written in a way that was not happy on NT. In fact, the software was designed by the same people who designed the original back end code for the Solaris version of Hotmail. Basically, they just ported their code, that hardly ever works right.
2.) NT (not to mention 2k) can handle just as many hits as Solaris, or any other Unix platform. This has been shown time and time again, but people seem to like to ignore facts and concentrate on a three year old story about poorly written back end code.
3.) The reason they are doing it step by step (as in not just going, BOOM... all 20mil users on Win2k now,) is for debugging reasons. If a few thousand accounts get screwed, that's much easier to fix than a few million.
There are MANY sites on the net that get far more traffic than hotmail (the MSN homepage for instance) and they handle the load just fine. Doesn't that make you think?
It's not the number of *accounts* that matters, it's the number of simultaneous users.
There is nothing related here to justify the headline. Pure FUD. I can understand the move on Microsoft's part though -- it's got to stick in their craw that their most successful net service has been running on Unix since day one. I wonder if they expect any benefits (besides marketing) from the "upgrade"?
While I'm on the topic of misleading Win2000 figures, allow me to quote Microsoft's latest full-page newspaper ad:
That means nothing, of course, since the numbers aren't in. Wouldn't expect them to wait, though.
Kook9 out.
Once all the results are in, I expect to be heralded the greatest lover on the planet.
From what I have seen, Win2000 is not your father's NT. I've had lots of trouble keeping windows NT running my web apps, but windows 2000 seems more stable. I still have my doubts about it being better than any unix derivative, and so I moving all my code to platform independence, and it will probably end up on AIX (I am trying to get some linux/FreeBSD boxen up and running, but I have to clear off the servers running NT right now. (there are too many other employees who readily jump into the easy but proprietary trap where I work))
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
What better way could there possibly be to test how a product holds up under high stress than to attach it to a giant e-mail network, first attempting to take 5% of the load, and then slowly incrementing it to see if and when it will choke?
And if you don't particularly want to be a beta tester, maybe you shouldn't use a giant, unruly, insecure, slow, free e-mail account as your primary mail provider. Sheesh.
As much as most of us hate Microsoft, this experiment can only do harm to hotmail. It can't really do harm to the software being tested, and it might actually end up improving it.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
The story, as posted, said that Microsoft has moved machines into its load-balancing pool. It made no mention of removing the BSD machines. Adding nodes can only make the system faster, regardless of whether the new nodes are Windows or BSD.
:)
Perhaps they could have made a better choice of OS, for *name your favorite reason here*. But hey, it's Microsoft, and they're in love with thier own stuff! Aren't we all?