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Red Hat/Apache Slower Than Windows Server 2003?
phantomfive writes "In a recent test by a company called Veritest, Windows 2003 web server performs up to 300% higher throughput than Red Hat Linux running with Apache. Veritest used webbench to do there testing. Since the test was commisioned by Microsoft, is this just more FUD from a company with a long history? Or are the results valid this time? The study can be found here."
Here's an article from linuxworld. Dated but shows that Veritest makes mistakes in setup.
I personally run a windows based server (yes, hate me if you will, but i need some windows only tools at the moment). I used IIS for about 3 to 4 years, until I started to get heavy into PHP development, running a source control system, and game hosting. I switched from IIS to Apache because it had better support for virtualizing directories based off of conditions in easy to setup script files, which made it easy for me to run the UT2004 server, plus mod download server on the same box. This turned out to be a big hit at lan-parties, since the server had all of the packages, and would share directly from the server folders (but restricted the server's config files from anon access). I later switched to SVN for storing my programming projects, and its integration with Apache is great.
I am a microsft OS user by nature. I switched to using Apache on my Windows server because of features it lacked, and now I'm never turning back.
"I am Darkain... and I'm a coder"
Microsoft argue that Apache is slower because CGI is slower. They say that it needs to spawn a new process for each request, which is correct.
But how many years have mod_perl and mod_php been around now? Does anyone actually use CGI on Apache this decade?
Perhaps a more fair comparison would have compared CGI on IIS with CGI on Apache. And I'm pretty sure that for various reasons (spawning processes is slower on Win32 than on Linux) IIS would lose horribly.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Actually the ultimate test would be for an independant party to Sponsor a challenge.
Each would team would get(windows and linux):
$5,000 in cash with which to buy hardware and software. All purchases must carry a receipt and all parts must run to spec. No overclocking.
Garunteed 5 9's power.
Each Team's computer will be housed in the same independant facility maintained by Sponsor.
The contest can last no longer than a year. Each team will be able to maintain their own server throughout the competition.
The scoring will be simple. You won't lose points for having down time. Your score is simply the number server pages(the kind to be determined) you've properly served before your first moment of downtime. So if your server crashes before the year is over, the number of pages served up to that point is your score.
Maybe someone has an idea for what a good server is to run.