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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).
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 /...
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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" :-)
> ... didn't happen, and stop spreading the rumor ...
>
> that it did
>
Hotmail did, indeed, try to migrate to NT. Two
things happened:
1. The engineers they hired to do the move said
that it could not be done, and that the systems
just could not stand up to the load.
2. The Unix admins threatened to quit on the spot
if they continued to threaten to move Hotmail to
NT. All of Microsoft's significant ISP services (Hotmail and WebTV, of note) run on Solaris. Hotmail uses some FreeBSD. Linux and FreeBSD, as well as NT, comprise some of the tools people use
on the backend for development and such, but the
infrastructure of both sites is primarily Solaris.
Note that all this information can be found easily by public means, so I'm divulging no information by saying this.
--=:: Wings and tail and snout and scales of blackest night
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.
I read the WSJ about once a week and I've seen quite a lot of tech-oriented articles right on page 1. Napster has gotten a lot of coverage lately (obvious business impact there). I've also seen several articles about Outlook security holes that have been pretty harsh against MS. I'm pretty sure they put an article about the backdoor in HotMail a few months ago on page 1. They definately have good tech reporting because Slashdot links stories to WSJ.com all the time.
-B
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.
Yea, I had bought Opera for Windows. As for the sites I visit I mostly go to bebits, betips, benews, and Be's developer website.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
So you've used Windows 2K. I'm thinking of shelling out the money for it, but I'm not quite sure how it will run. I've got a similar config to yours, and NT4 WKS runs quite fast on my machine. However, all the sites seem to say that you need a lot more hardware for Win2K. In your opinion, how does the speed of Win2K compare to Win98 in terms of interactive performance? Also, I heard there were troubles Quake and other 3D shooters running a lot slower in Win2K than in 98. Are any of those substantiated? Any advise you could offer would be appreciated.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Cool. Thanks for your help. :) ;)
BTW> I feel proud of myself. I bought Gobe Productive, Opera, and actually registered SoundPlay
As for putting the money into BeOS, that's probably what I'll do. I mean, I can always get Win2K burned for me. (Of course if MS comes asking, I never said that
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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
Something about having the bastards by the balls, and not expecting much repeat business.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
=====
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
You, sir, need to read Necronomicon: In The Beginning Was The Command Line. Several times I reckon.
The GUI is an obstruction, unnecessary fluff that just gets in the way. When you are talking about servers, its about using the hardware to do one thing, fast and simultaneously: Serve The Users.
Not load Internet Explorer at boot
Not bring the server to its knees running OpenGL 3D screensavers, and certainly not to run DirectX games.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.ht ml
Here is an excerpt from the book:
------
Copyright 1999 by Neal Stephenson
During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW. MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the premier software development system for the Mac. It was what Apple's own engineers used to write Macintosh code. Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even exist yet, and given that this was the actual program used by Apple's world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations. It arrived on a stack of floppy disks about a foot high, and so there was plenty of time for my excitement to build during the endless installation process. The first time I launched MPW, I was probably expecting some kind of touch-feely multimedia showcase. Instead it was austere, almost to the point of being intimidating. It was a scrolling window into which you could type simple, unformatted text. The system would then interpret these lines of text as commands, and try to execute them.
It was, in other words, a glass teletype running a command line interface. It came with all sorts of cryptic but powerful commands, which could be invoked by typing their names, and which I learned to use only gradually. It was not until a few years later, when I began messing around with Unix, that I understood that the command line interface embodied in MPW was a re-creation of Unix.
In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market.
------
Kind of ends where MacOS X is picking up.
Lars -
..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.
Please. That has got to be one of the most biased things I've ever seen. How could you possibly get a good idea of how NT or Win2K performed in comparison to Solaris or Linux by reading that. Its no different than accepting the (Microsoft sponsored) mindcraft benchmarks, which show NT and IIS to be head and shoulders above everything else as a web server.
Bias is bias no matter where it comes from and I will religiously avoid it when it comes time to making decisions. The kirch papers can only possibly serve to make you feel good about choosing Linux/Solaris, while mindlessly spewing the evils of Microsoft. They certainly can't be classed as intelligent analysis or comparison.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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
$
After buying Hotmail in the end of 1997 they tried to run it on NT. Here's an article about it.
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.
=====
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
=====
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
-------------------
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?