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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."
Looking at the first page of the benchmark report, I see that they're using the exact same setup as in their highly contested samba benchmark, with a specific ancient version of Red Hat running on a specific hardware setup that version is known to have performance problems on. They could have at least tried a different server last time, or a modern version of Linux. Under fairer circumstances, who knows, IIS might have still won, but this rigged benchmark has nothing to offer us in deciding which server is faster.
10%? 15%? Those are numbers I'd believe. But THREE HUNDRED PERCENT? I like Microsoft, and I like when somebody defends them. But this is just bull.
Out of the box Apache doesn't do too well. But take some time tuning it, and your OS's TCP/IP stack, and you can easily outperform even Zeus. Read some of the tuning guides.
Let's see. A test commissioned by Microsoft says IIS is faster than Apache. The link for more information goes to microsoft.com. Is this really "news"? Seems more like a thinly-disguised press release...
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Veritest used webbench to do their testing.
At least they're up-front about it these days.
Other Veritest-Microsoft fun:
http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/fact
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/compare/veritest.as
In short, this is a company paid by Microsoft to make reports/whitepapers that make Microsoft look good. Nothing wrong with that as long as everyone's aware
rooooar
Notice the total lack of the CGI script?
And the results are interesting. The Gentoo server doesn't perform nearly as fast as the Windows Server for most basic serving tasks. But software like Exchange Server is so badly written that it's much slower than postfix.
It's sad. If the same people writing 2k3 were writing products like Exchange, we wouldn't have a need for the Linux server.
Faster to get infected.
Faster to get rooted.
Faster to get used as a warez server.
Nothing new here.
Reminds me of this editorial on the G5's testing by Veritest. http://spl.haxial.net/apple-powermac-G5/
So does that make SMS on Windows faster than morse code on Linux?
I wonder if Bill Gates actually believes his own bullshit...
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
If they were running heavily restricted SELinux on RedHat it wouldn't be surprising to witness a massive slowdown on certain applications, and will likely be infinitely more secure than a Windows box probably could ever be. Beyond that Apache can be very slow out of the box, on my hardened gentoo test system (please withhold funroll loops jokes) Apache2 with hardened PHP + MySQL I would be lucky to handle 2 requests a second happily, it was amazingly slow. I've yet to fully tune it but some even basic tuning was able to improve speeds dramatically. It wouldn't surprise me if similar techniques were used by this "benchmark".
What possibly possessed them to publish these results. No one in their right mind is going to believe 300% is an accurate figure under fair testing conditions.
Philosophy.
Why couldn't IIS be faster than Apache?
Is Apache/Linux the "end-all-be-all, there is nothing that can be better so let's stop trying" type of quality?
Are the guys who work at Microsoft a bunch of idiots that anyone can out-program?
I'm sure IIS is better at some things, maybe more things, maybe less.
Who cares! I don't think stats like these are why anyone chooses Apache/Linux over IIS/Windows.
I'll test the amazing Linux versus the ultra-slow windows NT.
Config:
Linux: Latest Redhat running on Opteron 4GHz
Windows: Windows 3.1 running on a Pentium 100.
And the winner is...?[/sarcasm]
Windows 2003 server running on skynet is 300% Faster than Ye-oldie redhat -12 edition from 1723 running on an abacus.
This reliable Expensive test paid for by Microsoft to show how much better windows 2003 server is(the payment came with a clause stating such).
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
And remember, that the TC0 (0 for 0wnersh1p) is lower for Windows as well (""Immunity's findings clearly show that the best platform for your targets to be running is Microsoft Windows, allowing YOU unparalleled value for THEIR dollar."). For anyone who missed it, /. had a lot of great discussion on that one from people who couldn't detect a troll.
The web page says it was published May 5, 2004, i.e. a year ago. The report itself is dated from April 2003. The test was done using RH advanced server 2 and Windows 2003 RC2, i.e. a pre-release version. Since then, both RH and Microsoft have published new releases, for example the service pack 1 of Windows 2003. Why is this posted now?
Sheesh -- with such outdated news, I almost felt like I was reading the newspaper or something.
Here's an article from linuxworld. Dated but shows that Veritest makes mistakes in setup.
Wonder what that benchmark would be if you installed the FULL Norton package on it?
This bull reminds me of those advertisements for weight loss.
BEFORE................AFTER
Stick stomach out....Suck stomach in
White......................Tanned
No cosmetics..........New facial
Front shot...............Side shot
Grubby clothes........New fashions
2003 has kernel-level webserver acceleration and offloads a lot of the processing
there, the same was as the Tux webserver (also RedHat?) beat the shit out of
Apache. It's essentially zero-copy-networking with zero-copy-webserving too.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/global.asp
There may be some truth in it, therefore. Aren't there some patches these days to
hook Apache directly into the Linux kernel too, since Tux is obselete? I doubt
they ship with RedHat's stock system though even if they exist.
Every time you mention a company's name you are giving it free advertising. It seems that for commercial entities it is better to be well known than well liked.
So why shouldn't people deny that freebie by refusing to use the exact name?
Regards,
Tim
This is all just my personal opinion.
I've been around on the net for a while now and if there is one thing I can say that is universal it's that servers that implement ASP are generally more flaky than other types of servers.
I use tvlistings2.zap2it.com which has ASP, and while I think they've gotten far better in the recent past, even 4 or 5 months ago, it would routinely lose my channel line up and if I'd try to log in to reset the cookie it would claim my login account doesn't exist. I'd follow their suggestion and try recreating the account and it said it was already in use. But I can't log in because it doesn't exist, but I can't recreate it because it already exists, but I can't log in because it doesn't exist.......
Anyway, I notice time and time again how sites that churn out ASP pages have typically slower response times compared to ones that have PHP or straight static HTML. For anyone who wonders how I determine that, I go to load a web page, and I wait for it to load. If it starts taking a while and I mean a really long while, I look at the URL and more often than not, I'll see it has a reference to an ASP. Maybe the "oh it's another one of those stupid IIS servers" makes it stick out in my mind more than "wait, this one is slow. I don't really know what's running it but it's crap", but if I had to put money on it, I'd say the IIS servers are generally slower.
I don't run a web server, I could, but I don't. Managing web servers would not be a job I'd want to do. Almost all of my web server experience is on the visitor side and without any kind of overtly blatant bias from any sources (like the kind of "windows crashes therefore windows is evil and anything dealing with windows is also evil") to affect my opinion, I'd have to say that I personally experience a more significant lack of performance and reliability visiting web sites that run IIS than other sites that don't appear to run it. So to me, a report like this is microsoft's ever so polite way of trying to stick an uncomfortably large tube up my ass and then proceeding to blow smoke through the opening.
Anyone do the math to see what that would cost.
It's conventional wisdom that Google has about 100,000 servers. If google went with Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition (which costs $3999 ) That would cost google about half a billion dollars.
Extending the logic to use SQL Server Enterprise Edition as their search database, at $25000/server the price would go up to about $2.5 Billion.
Every CEO likes to be like Google and likes talking about numbers like billions of dollars; so this is a fun set of numbers to throw around when your're discussing microsoft partnerships with the CEO.
(Note, however, that in the true spirit of Team99, I must say that Longhorn will make it well worth the price, though, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Google switch)
People keep saying, 'When are we going to get a real benchmark?" Well, why don't we roll our own? Seriously.
Here's my idea:
Slashdot has strong zealot^H^H^H^H^H^Hsupporters for both Microsoft and Linux. Let's have a contest to select the best qualified from each side, have them work in teams on identical hardware. Let them make any changes, tweaks or optimisations they can dream up. Then, let 'em rip.
I'm dead serious about this, by the way. Let's get off this endless roundabout and for once make a clear comparison.
For bonus points, once the first contest is finished, we should take the two servers, leave them exposed to the Internet and see which one gets 0wned first. 8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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, it's learned behavior. We've seen so many fact-warping MS-sponsored studies, astroturfing campaigns, dissembling regarding the nature of their monopoly, and other aggressive PR that it's no wonder people are more than a little skeptical.
This reminds me of something someone told me about graphic card benchmarks. He is a 3d graphics professional, and he was called in by a rather large chip company to help them in a test against another large chip maker's video card. The arrangement was that he would work with the representative from the other company to come up with a "fair" set tests to which both sides could agree.
As the more experienced guy, he was able to get his counterpart to agree to tests that worked squarely in favor of his company's card. This is in a scenario where it is supposed to be evenhanded, since both companies agreed to the test methodology.
So it's bad enough already. Compare a situation like that to one in which Microsoft is commissioning a study, and you can imagine why people react with such profound skepticism.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
So, for that piece of crap, you say "a *lot* of stuff he says is 'true'" (emphasis mine), and the best you offer is that people using appellations like "Micro$oft" burns your ass? Come on. Maybe it's the "penis envy" part? Or the part about "Setting up a server in Windows takes a couple of minutes"? Sorry, I see a bunch of wanking and sour-graping, combined with outright lies, and a few pointed pokes at the Linux Zealot community - which I don't credit with any 'hit points' because this is obviously from someone who would like to be a Windows Zealot, but isn't competent... or maybe it's a Linux Zealot making Windows Zealots look like idiots?
Thinking outside my Head
I actually thought that this was common knowledge--that Windows Server 2003 with ASPX was faster than Linux/Apache with PHP, or that Server 2003 was generally faster with static content. (I admit, I only glanced over the article, and Adobe Acrobat's search tool is the worst of crap, so sue me if it didn't mention ASPX).
.NET framework for web content delivery (get it--the 'X' makes it sound cool. Or something). .NET is compiled, and ASPX needs neither process nor thread creation. Like any .NET application, ASPX can run sort of close to native speeds (native + lots of wrapper overhead + generic memory management overhead and such.)
1)ASP (not ASPX) are fairly flaky and recent versions are roughly comparable to, but slower than, PHP4 (not sure about 5), in general.
2) Windows is not very good at creating new processes quickly. This is why CGI (not fastCGI) in the platform is so glacially slow.
Let's have an example. Let's say that you make a dynamic webpage in which all content is generated by a C++ CGI program. Ignoring database access for the time being, since that dilutes the example, on Windows, the website would be MUCH slower than the same website written in ASPX, even though the actual execution time of the C++ program is shorter (assuming a competent C++ coder).
This is because for each request, Windows must create a new process (the CGI program), and destroy the process when the request is complete.
While the execution time is low, the process management overhead dwarfs the actual page runtime, because Windows doesn't do that sort of thing quickly. This is why CGI has long been blacklistedon Windows systems by good web devs, and this is one reason that Apache 1.x was such a dog on Windows. Apache 1.x creates a new Apache process for each request.
Now Linux, on the other hand, creates processes about as fast as it creates threads, which is to say, really damn fast. Apache 1 has always worked just fine on Linux (and indeed most Unix systems) because the overhead of creating a process, while significant, isn't slower than a dead slug stuck in frozen molasses like it is on Windows.
Apache 2.x allows requests to be served by a thread or a process, or a number of processes that each create several threads (any Apache gurus please correct me if any of this is off).
It follows that this isn't a big deal on Linux (because process creation isn't really much slower than thread creation), but is a very big deal on Windows.
Windows has ASPX, which is Microsoft's marketing term for the use of the
Yet Apache is still back here creating a process or thread for each and every request (note that there are some ways to speed things up. FastCGI comes to mind, but I don't want to get into the gory details that I don't know enough about). This is not the brightest way to do it in terms of performance, but then, Apache appears to have been designed for universality and configurability over raw throughput.
It is unwise to hold the attitude that Apache can't be beaten by IIS, especially when IIS is optimized for one platform--by the vendor of that platform. Apache isn't even the fastest on Linux. Take a look at Zeus webserver. It serves circles around Apache on any platform it supports--including Penguin land.
In fact, Zeus uses a technique called SendFile() which, oddly enough, is strikingly similar Microsoft's own TransmitFile() API. Hmm.
Think of it this way: Apache is to IIS as GCC is to ICC, at least in terms of performance and generality.
Intel's compiler (ICC) consistantly blows away GCC in terms of the performance and size of the compiled code, but GCC runs on just about anything with a CPU, can cross-compile, is free, doesn't pull any PHB evil tricks, and actually compiles things like the Linux kernel without pat
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
If someone publishes a benchmark about your software, and finds out your software does not perform well, don't whine, don't behave like a child, don't start kicking and screaming, don't tear his hair out. Behave professionally.
Good starting points:
Let me summarize what I think about their test. First of all, I believe their numbers. Apache sucks performance-wise, in particular if you run a busy site with dynamic content. That's why people are using squid in local accelerator mode before Apache. This is a good indication that some performance tuning is in order. But no, people rather wait for Microsoft to find out and then they start thinking about fixing it.
If this test was meant to be unfair FUD, they would not have tested TUX, just Apache.
But now to my questions above:
Question 1: is their setup relevant?
No. Sites who answer more than 5000 requests per second are not using a single web server, they are using a load balancer and a cluster.
Question 2: Can their numbers possibly be true?
The point I find least believable is that IIS had better CGI performance than Apache. Creating a process is really slow on Windows. Their result should be independently verified.
Question 3: What weak spots about the competition does their test reveal?
They did not test a single-CPU webserver (which is what almost everyone is using).
They did not test FastCGI or APAPI dynamic web pages.
So if we wanted to do a more balanced review, we would look at these.
Question 4: What can we do to improve the results.
Document APAPI better, I'd say. Almost nobody is writing their dynamic web page modules with APAPI.
Everyone is using PHP or mod_perl. Benchmark Apache in real-world scenarios. Document best practices.
Allowed HTML: ... <a> ...
Can anyone tell me how do I use that?
<a href="...">...</a> does not work.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
> 1. You rejuvenate and dance when you hear a windows flaw exposed, but you conveniently ignore the thousands of security flaws exposed in linux.
"Rejuvenate" means "renew, appear to grow younger". Did you mean "become jubilant"?
I don't become jubilant when anybody's security flaw is exposed. In the case of Open Source apps, patches are generally available in a couple of days.
> 2. You yell loudly TROLL! at any person's post or at any person you see posting facts that you do not want to hear about your oh so cool linux.
No, just the ones that misstate the facts or are attempts at FUD.
> 3. You know it's a classic case of penis envy, you don't have all the support, software and hardware available for linux and you have to let that anger out somewhere, but you don't have the brains to admit it.
Um, Linux supports all my hardware just great.
> 4. You hate windows, hate Microsoft, but race to emulate windows, have programs to run office from within linux, and spend a $300 on a Windows emulator, only Windows fools.
> I run Linux, Windows, and Solaris machines. I use OpenOffice.org and so have no need for Microsoft Office. But if I did, I could run it using WINE, which I can get for free. Unlike MS Office.
> 5. You cannot admit that you don't have professional usage of Linux outside server markets.
I use Linux *professionally* on the desktop.
> 6. You cannot admit that most of the joe user out there when told that there is linux will respond, what is that?
Sounds like there's a need for some consciousness-raising, then. Alothugh I've noticed that more and more people -- even Joe Sixpack types -- don't go glassy-eyed when Linux is mentioned these days.
> 7. You cannot admit that there is no professional printing capabilities in linux.
I don't have any problems printing from Linux.
> 8. You cannot admit that you are a masochist (otherwise why would someone spend hours playing with scripts, and recompiling programs that are available for Windows?)
Well, it did take me about 30 seconds to learn how to type "./configure - make - make install - make clean". Or if I'm feeling lazy, I can just double-click an RPM file icon in Konqueror.
> 9. You cannot admit that there is no professional desktop publishing done on Linux.
Sorry, mate, you're talking to someone who does just that for a living.
> 10. You cannot admit that no one in their right mind would do professional video editing in Linux.
I honestly don't know about that. But I do know that lots of movies' special effects are being generated these days using Linux-powered render farms.
> 11. You cannot admit that linux sucks when it comes for gaming/home entertainment or education.
There are tonnes of educational apps available for Linux -- many of them come with commercial distros. There are still more on the Net. As for games -- if I want to play games, I'll buy an X-Box.
> 12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
Over the years, I've used and administered Windows 3.1/95/98/Me/2000 and have no problems doing so. But after just 6 months, I can install, configure, and administer a Linux machine faster and more reliably.
> 13. You have problems in pointing a clicking, but have no problems in wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics.
Pointing and clicking has its place. But there are lots of things that are actually easier via a command line. For instance, I'd much rather run a MySQL server that way than use the GUI tools. Nice thing about Linux and Open Source apps in general is that you've a choice in the matter. If you don't like the command line, don't use the bloody thing.
> 14. Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts.
Can't respond to an assertion that's semantically nil, sorry.
> 15. Yo
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't know if these numbers are trustworthy, but at least its another datapoint.
I have a choice of Larson, SDI, Zeh and Easycopy as linux vendors to print to the 42 inch non-postscript printers in my workplace - very much a niche market but still covered.
Microsoft never entirely took over the workstation market, and linux boxes have been used as cheap unix workstations for years.
Visual memory vs other kinds - some people find mousing through a lot of menus or the registry easier than flat config files, while I'm the other kind - valid point taken.
I run commercial software on 24 dual Xeon linux machines that costs almost as much each year as it did to buy the machines, but it is used to do things which make money for the company. It runs on solaris and AIX machines in the place as well. If I have a problem with it in the middle of the night there are people I can call to solve the problem - but normally emails with a one day lag due to time zones are good enough. As far as the company that sells the software is concerned we are a small operation - there are people with very big clusters out there.
Even from a disk image it take more than "a couple of minutes" to set up a windows server, even on something small like NT4.
It's unix - I know this!
Third party software is everywhere, and it gave MS Windows the ability to get onto the net. Why re-invent the wheel when you already have something decent in the same group?
X is old news and VNC has been around for a few years too - in a wide variety of different situations both appear to still be a better solution than windows terminal services.
Yes, but I'm doing it from work! However, Im doing it on a Saturday night while rebuilding a disk array - must be a masochist as specified above :(
Good point - all it took was one idiot giving all mail users shell access, turning on telnet and another idiot using "coffee" as a password and I had to rebuild a hacked box. You can set up an insecure system with just about any OS if you don't have a clue - there are plenty of people who use linux who don't have a clue, we all have to start somewhere - the learning curve is there, so if you don't know what to do you have to follow the docs or find out.
Have you ever seen other databases? MS Access vs most other databases is a similar comparison to MS Notepad vs most word processing software. Similarly you can still do decent work in MS Notepad, and sometimes that's all you need. MS Access doesn't even have a stable scripting language - I've learned two seperate scrip
that'd be cool - have a load balancing firewall to pass every other connection to the apache box, see if the iis box sets on fire
Hardware support maybe more complete on the x86 platform but that's it. Linux has far superior hardware support over all.
would like to see more effort towards binary compatability in the kernel to support binary drivers a bit more consistantly though.
There is a reason that binary compatibility doesn't exist in proprietary drivers. Linux is a free system and was never intended to support 3rd party, proprietary drivers.
IMHO BSD is probably a better OS option than Linux is in a lot of ways (free/open/net)... though linux has the fame, glory, and fanatic following. I like windows, I use windows...
I see this posted all the time but It just leads me to beleive the poster has never used Linux or BSD. It seems like people are using this line to try and ward of criticism by saying "look, I like free software, just not Linux", or "I like Unix, just not Linux".
Time makes more converts than reason
The red flag here is "300%." I don't think anyone can take it seriously with such a large desparity. That's like two hybrid car makers competing and the salesman tells a customer "Yeah, they get 50mpg but ours gets a bagillion-zillion!"
If you require identical hardware, some might complain that it's more suited to a particular system. Give them a fixed amount of money for the server. Or a fixed amount of other resources that might be the bottleneck (power, floorspace, maintenance time/month,...)
What keeps me going is my inertia.
Reading you link...
So I presume... nobundaegi is good for you
Of course, the budget has to buy both software and hardware.
:-)
After all, we want to count TCO and performance, right?
Kind of like the ultimate fighting championship -- no holds barred compentition between alpha geeks to see who can webbench more.
:Windows, RHEL, FreeBSD and MacOS (Of course, the Mac group will have to work with the closest apprixmation we can manage to the x86 box going by paper specs). Their task will be to build an ecommerce site and successfully run it without getting hacked for four successive weeks, armed only the documentation provided with the operating system.
Of course this is completely irrelevant to real world usage scenarios. What we need is another data point from the other end of the spectrum. It can be like one of those reality shows. You rope four teams of ordinary folk right of the street, hand each team identical base (no OS) servers, only each team gets a different operating system
We can call it SURV1V0R.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Surprise, they enabled DisableLastAccesS on windows but did not mounted linux filesystems with noatime
noatime disables the update of the "last accesS" field of files, and improves the performance a lot for some workloads. If you check the latest article about the kernel.org servers, they found that they reduced the system load to the half by just using this option
This analisys is biased. Who cares, anyway?
This way, each side may tweak their setup to the max, using all specialized knowledge, to get maximum performance. Since each side may run the optimal hardware configuration (given price restrictions), the practice of hobbling the other side by picking ill-supported hardware is prevented.
This test best conforms to the sort of thing an end user would do - pick the best bang for the buck for the budget and task at hand.
Now, this might result in a dual Itanium server (Windows) being benchmarked against a dual Power server (Linux) (or some other comparison), but that is "fair" in that both sides are running on the same COST hardware.
True, each side might "release" a new (service pack|set of RPMs) for the purposes of the test, but as long as those releases are publicly available, who cares? We all benefit from the improvement of the code.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I have to applaud the way you take a positive stance and look at how apache can be improved. I expect efforts in that direction form an ongoing part of apache development, but the positive attitude is appreciated. It's just a bit sad that your post reads as an endorsemnt of a blatant piece of paid-for propaganda
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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.
Figures that right after submitting this I see that they turned off access logging in Apache. Doh!
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The budget has to buy software, hardware and setup labor.
This eliminates the problem of "that hardware favors Microsoft" or "that team had better engineers". It all comes down to money and value.
Of course the competition would need to state up front exactly how performance would be measured and how the various different tasks (static pages, cgi, etc.) would be weighted to come up with any overall scores. That would dictate the design choices made by each team.
One simple rule for its versus it's
The "big players" can contribute cash, but not hardware. It is too easy for them to contribute hardware specifically enhanced for their product.
#1. Each team gets X dollars and no restrictions on what it can buy. After all, that should be how businesses run their shops. We aren't comparing hardware, but total systems.
#2. Each team must purchase the software off the shelf.
#3. No team is allowed to recompile anything or to use any drivers, etc not available from a public server for the past 12 months. This might sound like a bad deal for Linux, but it will also stop Microsoft from re-writing the drivers. Again, most companies do not have access to that level of expertise so that won't be allowed.
#4. Each tweak or configuration setting must be documented and a reference for it shown on a public website or manual. Again, businesses only know what they can read.
#5. At the end of the competition, the other teams will critique each team's configuration. We've all seen the "tests" where Windows is running on a RAID 0 array which is beyond stupid for real production work.
That way, each team can deploy the best system they can think of for the test. I'm sure you all remember MindCraft and their massive single server "test" for webservers when anyone else would have run multiple cheaper servers and gotten higher throughput.
So, a test in run and the Windows team buys the biggest single system they can afford for the money. While the Linux team fields a dozen boxes booting from CD and one storage box.
Which system would be "better"?
Which system would be faster? Would that be the same answer under different loads?
Which system would be easier to maintain?
Which system would have higher uptime?
Which system would be easier to scale up?