Slashdot Mirror
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."
you like microsoft ? um is this slashdot ?
This report may be two years out of date, but I can't see any signs of bias in its production.
I see a few signs. The first thing I noticed is that they used Compaq Smart-Start to install Windows. Smart-Start basically ensures that the installed OS automatically gets the right drivers, and configures tweaks specifically for the vendor's hardware. The out-of-the-box Red Hat installs may have used older and sometimes generic hardware drivers.
I also noticed that for the Red Hat installs, they selected "custom" but left all the pre-selected items checked. IIRC, this installs a lot of crap, including many optional daemons. I doubt their Windows configuration had lots of extraneous services installed and running.
They shut off access logging in IIS. As far as I could see, they left logging on for Red Hat. This means that lots of disk writes were being generated on Linux but not on Windows. As http request volume goes up in their tests, the RAID write-cache could eventually fill up (only under Linux), at which point the webserver starts blocking while waiting for disk I/O to complete.
As others have pointed out, there are also possible issues with CGI, the SSL handshaking, etc.
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!