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OSS Web Stacks Outperformed by .Net?
Gimble writes "eWeek has an article up that looks at the performance of portals using open source stacks and comparing them to their MS equivalents. The article's conclusion is that .Net outperforms the open source stacks, mainly because of its tighter integration, but also notes that running the open source stacks on Windows (WAMP) delivered strong performance." From the article: "Based on our forays into user forums for many top open-source enterprise applications, there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source products on Windows servers--attracted, no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators. The results of our WAMP stack tests indicate that these folks might be on to something."
From the article: "The criticism we expect to hear most is of the stacks we left out--including commercial J2EE platforms, such as those available from BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, as well as the many other database and server platform permutations." I can't believe they came to this conclusion on such little data. They did, however, create a blog to disparate results can be shared.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I'm no system administrator, but I have a home box running WAMP (XAMPP on 2003) and it's good enough for my needs. Recently I tried out Ubuntu Server to see what it's about, and I'm tempted to buy a new pc just to run that. When I tried to run mod_python under WAMP it took a whole lot of debugging and configuration (apparently it didn't like the already installed python 2.4), but with Ubuntu it was as simple as apt-getting it.
I would very much like it if I could continue using Windows (because I run other programs that are not available on Linux) but it can't match the simplicity of Ubuntu.
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If Linux wins, its a fact.
If M$ wins, its fud and was paid for.
If apple wins, its because of Steve Jobs.
If OS/2 wins, we're trapped in a parallel universe.
This'll now be a high priority - beating .Net speed-wise - in the next few releases, such that by Christmas, we'll see *AMP performance picking up, whereas we have to wait on MS for .Net
Running a web server over an RF port from the wrist watch to a phone scewed the results a bit, but its the only communication mode they had.
The smartphone was the only client they had handy to test with, since the test was carried out on a long flight.
Amazing stuff!
I'm still not exactly sure what they tested. They have vague terms like "Request per Second" and "Throughput", yet they don't actually say what each page that is being requested is actually doing.
.NET tests they say they used "Sharepoint". Huh? For what? Considering that Sharepoint is *extremely* complicated and has incredibly rich functionality they should be very clear as to what they used it for.
For the
Not to mention the fact that using a portal application in your tests means that there is really very little way to isolate if it was a poorly written portal application or a crappy framework that the portal application was built on that's causing perf issues.
It is very difficult to test framework vs framework, but this is just about the worst way one could even attempt it.
At absolute best, this compares portal frameworks on various platforms. Even if they were trying to do that, they did a piss poor job.
How can you test the performance of a stack and compare it to others when the back end database servers, portal software and web server software is different?
.NET stacks are faster true when it could be the implementation of SQL being faster than MySQL? This test just doesn't make sense to me.
How is the statement that
The article mentions that the Linux test system was "untuned." If this means "out of the box, running a kernel compiled for i386 and without any network tuning" then these results are hardly informative.
Just kidding. We all know Windows cleans Linux's clock.
The .NET CLR runs compiled bytecode and IIS runs in kernelspace, the only httpd I know running in kernel space on nix is tux (redhat content accelerator) and nobody in their right mind is going to serve dynamic content with that. Did they test PHP with an opcode cache and the CLR running a dynamic language? This isn't even apples and oranges, it's apples and teapots. If I wanted performance, I wouldn't be running either Apache or PHP!
If you're getting your ass kicked by .net, you are one girly man coder.
Not to start a war here, but ASP.Net is a pretty damned nice environment to work under... I've used a lot of PHP, Cold Fusion, some JSP, and Classic ASP in the past. ASP.Net is my favorite.. I've been peeking in with Ruby/Rails but just haven't had the time to dive in much. of the above Ruby/Rails is probably the closest competitor on an ease of development/functionality level.
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Because I don't feel like paying $1500 per machine for Windows 2003 server on every server in my web farm. Shit, that's twice as much as the servers I'd run it on! Grid computing and server farms are very poorly suited to a commercial operating system.
I'm actually wondering how the wonderful non-biased folk here at /. are going to interpret these results.
I don't know a damn thing about any of this but it says to me from a layman's point of view that invidually maintained and installed components are just not as efficient as a completely integrated suite of applications, and this is exactly how the ignorant bosses of knowledgeable admins will see it. Though I was interested to see the rise in the use of OSS in the workplace.
I could have gone down the whole "OSS SUX" route but that's a flamewar I'm not starting.
(Today.)
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
What was the set of measures? For me, "performance" has more to do with uptime, reliability and security. Those are the performance standards I care about.
I'm wondering if the high throughput numbers for the .Net stack were caused by it deliving huge binary files to the client. Ya know, 17MB Active X controls. Anyway, I didn't randomly come up with this conclusion, the article didn't mention the transactions per second for .Net. So, I conclude from ALL of the data that it did one transaction of 17MB*.
*No math was done to come up with the 17MB figure.
Also, no animals were harmed during the writing of this comment.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
I've read the article before it hit /. and their conclusion is that there is no clear winner. .Net outperforms OSS solutions on some tests and vice-versa. The surprising(*) results are how good WAMP performed in some of the tests (if you really want specifics RTFA). Here is a direct link to the tests.
.Net, i.e. Mono apps with .Net framework vs pure .Net and pure Mono, so although there is no connection between JIT compilers and web servers performance, the trend is there.
* - I've seen similar results in benchmarks of Mono &
Too bad the article haven't touched Mono.
> echo $POINT
POINT: Undefined variable.
Can someone explain it to me?
I don't think it is FUD, but I do get the impression that they are trying to invent a benchmark that really doesn't make any sense. Different PHP projects can have vastly different performance; and I'm not sure that Plone compares to Sharepoint server. I wouldn't know, though, because I don't use Sharepoint, and I have little/no idea what they did in the test.
Anyone have a closer hunch?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
But this is a very close second place.
#1. NO tuning was done on the LAMP stuff. None at all. They ran the stuff "out of the box".
#2. They didn't write their own app. That means they didn't test the SAME processes on each system.
#3. They didn't bother to find WHERE the differences were. Is it in the IP stack? Is it in the OS? Is it in the scripting language? Is it in the app?
How bad can "research" be and still be published in "eWeek"? There wasn't any research done for that article.
Microsoft has, in the past, taken various short-cuts when IIS was the server and IE was the browser. Is that the case in this "study"? Are the other "stacks" "slower" because they follow the protocols?
You won't know because they'd didn't LOOK for the REASON behind their "results".
At least MindCraft was paid to do poor research.
Different day, same old story Makes you wonder when people will finally stop taking these kind of 'studies' serious...
MS also had the fastest java runtime back in the day. It isn't suprising that there .net compiler is also very fast.
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"At absolute best, this compares portal frameworks on various platforms. Even if they were trying to do that, they did a piss poor job."
No study that concludes Microsoft's product is faster, more efficient or "better" in any way will ever be accepted here because holes can be poked in the methodology of any study. ANY study.
And before you say, "Yeah, but look at the holes in this one!", let me repeat myself. No study will survive in the eyes of people who don't like the results.
This is an absolutely foolish example of a test. There are so many variables involved that any qualititive interpretration ('Windows stacks perform better') have no basis in the results. The authors openly state that they don't want to do a 'clean room' test and set up a hodge podge of different systems against each other in what amounts to a couple pages read many times (basically a stress test of apache/tomcat versus iis with dynamic pages).
The correct way to do this test is to test each component's time individually with carefully designed tests that translate well among the different platforms, then connecting the components and testing the full work flow time to measure interconnection delay. What is in the article is just a waste of time of the testers, the writers and the readers. Maybe xyz is better than abc, maybe not. Who knows with this test?
From TFBlurb: "...without having to become a Linux administrator"
.net is faster? maybe. That is a reason to revert from open source, not memory hungry, nice to code with stacks to Microsoftland? haha, no. Apart from the main reason (Freedom), the secondary reason (smalltalk on net is not like ruby on rails), if people reverted back to Microsoft Microsoft would revert back to itself in the 90's. Are you sure you want that? [N/N]
Thank $DEITY I did try getting Linux desktops on my home network and shortly after settled for apt-based distros. Linux administration is a breeze compared to windows. Desktop users' life is also good if peripherals are recognized, especially if by OSS drivers. Your mileage may vary cause most of you were familiar with windows in the first place, I came from good old macos. Anyway I don't care to try and convince you with examples. Those who are curious don't need my opinion, and the lazy ones are better of wherever they are.
Back to topic:
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
It is important to note that strong is not stronger and, in fact, could mean weaker. Couldn't it?
Also, in our imaginary world, the article might say: The conclusion is that OSS outperforms the
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
...but which 'P' did they use? Did they use mod_perl or mod_python, or just call things as straight CGI scripts? That would certainly kill performance. Did they preload often-used subroutines into the embedded apache stuff?
It's like saying that a Ferrari outpeforms a Mini. I'm sure it does, but that doesn't mean everyone is better off with a Ferrari than a Mini.
...your .Net solution also locks you into x86 chip architectures.
Performance so often comes at the expense of flexibility.
Given a requirement to work nicely across arbitrary hardware platforms with 'Doze, how will you do this? Emulation? Sorry about that performance...
Certainly, if you're starting from scratch, homogeneous is the way to go, but sometimes you're no' so lucky.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Am I the only person who has never heard of the word "stack" in this context?
Wikipedia: stacks - Nope
Google definition of stack - Nope.
Urban Dictionary: stack - Nope.
Dictionary.com - stack - Nope
Google search "IT stack" - Only hit is the eweek article.
I think they made up this term.
s/stack/platform/g
or
s/stack/framework/g
Isn't it against the M$ EULA to publish performance statistics of any .NET system without Micto$oft's approval? Could that explain the results?
So, they ran an outward-facing Zope server (after being explicitly told not to) and the performace was lackluster? Go figure. In the real world, they'd run Zope behind an Apache or Squid proxy (as per every installation recommendation I've ever seen) which would immediately boost throughput by an order of magnitude. In short, using Zope to dynamically generate static content instead of caching the results whenever possible is insane, and pretty much no one does it. They also apparently forgot about ZEO, although I'm not sure how you can be savvy enough to get Zope up and populated without knowing about it's built-in clustering.
Apparently they had no interest in any tuning whatsoever, to the point of de-tuning it by installing it in an explicitly unrecommended configuring. And then it lost. Go figure.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
1. They say no word about the problem and the implementation of the solutions. Results may vary depending on the problem.
2. Comparing J2EE/.NET to PHP/Plone is bollocks. Problems that are solved with J2EE/.NET today are so complex that choosing PHP/Plone instead is no option. It's like comparing trains to airplanes.
3. Where are tables, figures and graphs?
After reading the artical, and I hope there is some more real data somewhere as it's a piece of fluff, what I think they did was take a chunk of different web stacks using portals and compare them. That - to a degree - is fair. If I want to impliment a new setup, the first thing I am going to do is see what everyone else is running & how it works. Duplicating their setup and running a benchmark for web serving is a reasonable way to do that.
Can I run exactly the same benchmark against the different portals - no because the portals themselves are different.
Does the database choice influence the performace - absolutely, but it's not a matter of optimizing here - it's what is common in production.
Does the build of linux/apache effect the results - not so much within the same kernel build - distro choice is not going to make a huge difference.
Does the choice of 'P' effect the results - yes - they say as much by puting in a note that PHP is not designed for performance and better performance could probably be garnered from Zend tech.
The problem that bothered me was that they didn't tune anything. That's part of the test - they used essentially default settings for the whole LAMP/WAMP/WNet stack. That's where I think the major issue is going to be located. Tuning Apache is certainly an art, but the basics are fairly well defined. The configuration needed to run a high volume - dynamic page server is very different from a casual server on a junk box in the basement, and different still from a high volume static page server. This follows through with the SQL server and the script interpreter also - tuning is important to get the type of performance an enterprise is going to need/want.
The artical points out that they feel the major benifit of the WNet stack is the tight integration of the components - and thus the complimentary configurations and expectations of the components. I would like to see 2 more stages for this benchmarking. First, the default vs the tuned performance of the various configurations. Second, a mix & match of the MP components to get an idea of how exactly the various combinations of SQL servers and Script languages interact.
Who knew that a stateless, event-driven constantly running MVC-like framework would outperform scripting languages that had to be reset for each request? It's a good thing they didn't compare stuff such as RoR or Django with FastCGI and page cache, or else ASP.NET wouldn't look as great as it did in this article and eWeek would feel ashamed for still using the obsoleted ASP . . . well, that last one should be valid either way, especially since they WTFA.
Here is a direct link to the tests.
This tells us little to nothing about the tests... only their results.
Big difference.
(it isn't your link that is bad, the article is lacking)
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Anyone have a closer hunch?
Just guessing, but...
They needed an article that would appeal to a certain kind of advertiser and it had to fit in the smallest space possible.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
What the article left out was they put an unpatched box windows server on the internet for 10 minutes and the bandwidth they were just monitoring spam and sending out malware. More on nothing to see here.
You raise some excellent points. If I may be allowed to expand upon them ...
#1. Set a price limit. You can set multiple limits ($1,000 vs $5,000 vs $25,000 vs $100,000 vs $1,000,000+). The key concept here is that you get different characteristics as your budget increases/decreases. What characteristics does each "stack" offer in each price range? Yep, this does give the advantage to Free stacks (Free like speech, free like beer). Deal with it. In the Real World the bottom line is the bottom line. Each team gets to spend the money however they want to.
#2. Get the "experts" to tune each stack. BUT they must document each modification they make, including WHY they made that modification (what testing did they run and how did those test results tell them what mod's to make) AND they are only allowed to make mod's that can be found via public websites (no secret tuning parameters that are only known to the organization writing that software) AND they aren't allowed to touch any source code. They get what everyone else gets.
#3. The fun part. Each team gets to pull apart the work of the other teams. Even if your solution is faster for the specs given, how much wiggle room do you have? Is faster and fragile better than slower and stable? How much "slower" is acceptable for how much more "stable"? Can the other team defeat your security (network access only)?
#4. Freeze those systems. Then, over the next year, patch them and re-test them. Do the patches break the "tuning" that was done?
Now that would be an informative test process (and would result in lots of articles and interviews for the magazine publishing it).
Yeah, you can run Linux / Apache / MySQL / perl on a single drive workstation and get damn good performance for less than $300.
But that will be completely different from Oracle / Java on a cluster of Suns costing $10,000,000. And not just in the number of boxes you'd be running.
As recently as last month, one of our customers corrected their very peculiar connection issues by replacing their windows server with a linux server. For some reason the windows server was changing the acknoledgement part of the TCP header- for the same client- at the same computer- for every transmission.
Windows Servers/App languages doesn't seem to scale well. It's a *great* way to get your business up and running asap. But you run into growth problems and need to switch to an enterprise solution (oracle, as/400, java, linux, etc.) once you reach a certain size. I still prefer windows as a desktop OS for now. I still slightly prefer windows office to openoffice. I think part of that is years of using office makes me comfortable but openoffice gets closer every day to replacing it for my home and personal use. I will probably not buy another version of office unless it is super cheap ($50/included free on the PC I buy).
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You're right. They are comparing three complex web applications: JBoss Portal, Plone and SharePoint Server. Presumably, to make a benchmark out of it, they are testing how fast the corresponding webserver can spit out particular pages from each portal. Obviously, different portals are not going to be displaying the same content with the same presentation and structure. The performance would be dependant on how much database content is on the pages, what caching is being done, and how much other processing is needed for each page. This would vary drastically from page to page and from portal to portal.
They say "To test the IT stacks, we recorded a script doing basic tasks that could be repeated in every one of the portals. The tasks included loading an identical page from each portal, loading a members page and general portal surfing.". I have yet to see two portals capabable of serving "identical pages". Viewing a "members page" and "general portal surfing" are hardly objective tests.
I'll be charitable and call it stupidity rather than FUD.
I'm not surprised by this conclusion. Think about it for a minute; the .Net system was only ever truly designed to run on Windows which means the run-time's roots can go deep into the inner workings of the OS - kernel-level HTTP servicing for instance (a win2003 feature I recall).
.NET and Windows Server 2003 that I believe Microsoft were going to call it Windows Server 2003.NET at one point until they dropped the idea and opted for plain "Windows Server 2003" instead.
In fact, so tightly integrated are
That by design would give the extra performance gain, but of course lose flexibility too - something the article didn't explore much.
Essentially this is just another "flexibility vs. performance" argument here.
throw new NoSignatureException();
While performance is important, it's not even remotely the most important factor when deciding upon an API stack. It's much more important to have an environment that will help/let you code quickly. And other factors like flexibility, correctness, security, and reliability generally come before performance.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I think it is fairly clear that, even if Windows is faster than Linux in a given head-to-head comparison (even assuming its a MEANINGFUL comparison, which appears somewhat questionable in the present case), the overall performance difference is unlikely to be a real-world issue. There's no way the Linux developer community will tolerate a serious performance deficit relative to Windows, so Linux will always be at least close to Windows in performance -- except where it's better.
The important real-world issues are cost of ownership, what terms and conditions are attached to the acquisition and use of the software, and vendor support. Linux clearly wins on all three fronts in the server world. (Besides, what sane sysadmin would tolerate WGA doing whatever the hell it pleases on his servers?)
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
You seem, however, to be drawing a false conclusion from that, which is that the truth doesn't matter. In working social systems, accurate criticism creates effective responses, no matter what the disbelievers do.
Actually I specifically meant that the methodology (and potentially the truth, now that you mention it) doesn't matter HERE - on Slashdot.
You're right - it makes a difference to the world at large.
Hardware's cheap. People aren't, and the business certainly isn't
For any platform, chances are you're going to look at a whole bunch of variables:
Performance is going to come way down near the bottom of the list unless the difference is absolutely huge and cannot be made up by throwing some extra money at either a bigger server or a number of servers, which is likely to be significantly cheaper than the cost of retraining all your staff or hiring a team to write to a specific platform.
It depends on a lot more than just "is it IIS/.Net or is it LAMP?"
.Net itself vs. php or .jsp - it depends largely on several things:
.Net because performance (of at least 1.x.x versions, I haven't worked with it since) absolutely sucks to almost any PHP application.
.Net can provide blazing performance. Your code has to be very efficient and you often need to throw a real large amount of RAM at it. Also, when you start a .Net application, it can take a while for it to serve up the first page - a concern for Tuesday updates when you were forced to reboot for patches to finish installing.
.Net application? Say, OS Commerce vs. a custom single-purpose .Net eCommerce application? I'd darn well expect .Net to blow away the LAMP solution, because OS Commerce is an inefficient beast - the only thing going for it is is that it's a "swiss army knife" open source eCommerce application. It does EVERYTHING, but sacrifices efficiency due to its hacked-together design. (yes, I'm using "hacked" as in "that guy is a hack"). On the converse, if you compare, say, DotNetNuke to mambo or Drupal and set out to provide the same or similar functionality, chances are that the LAMP solution will blow away .Net by any load test metrics you can come up with.
.Net? Licensing. Hardware costs. Have you ever set up a Windows cluster? It's not cheap, and even if you can come up with a cheap way to do it, you don't WANT to because it will be unreliable. SQL Server licensing is EXPENSIVE (or if the db is real advantage of Microsoft's .Net platform? The development tools, NO one has an IDE which is better than Microsoft's. Zend's PHP Studio is darn good, but the level of integration with documentation, the debugging environment, the code completion, and keyboard navigation does not match Visual
On equivalent hardware, with equivalent RAM, if you're running MySQL with the MyISAM engine it will blow away SQL Server performance for most queries, but at a cost: You do not have stored procedures or transactions. When you switch to InnoDB you gain those but take a performance hit and that advantage over SQL Server disappears. On the plus side, MySQL is free/free (unless you need the commercial license - which in turn depends on whether you bundle it with your application AND how you interface with MySQL AND the "license" of your software).
As far as
- What is the architecture and how efficient is the code? If you use, say, DotNetNuke as an example, it's a good argument AGAINST using
- How much RAM can you throw at it, and is caching appropriate for your application? With fully dynamic web sites where pages may display random content (rotating images, randomized quote of the day, etc.) unless you override the caching mechanism, the cache can effectively break your web site. However if caching IS appropriate and/or you override it when necessary,
- (related to above) are you comparing a poorly-coded, inefficient, beastly PHP application to a lightweight highly-optimized
What is my point? Unless you are comparing apples to apples, it's FUD or at best an amateur comparison. The way to test it is to implement the same task with a similar (as possible) architecture on each platform, with the application on each fully optimized, with both IIS and apache/tomcat/whatever fully tuned and streamlined to pull out every bit of performance from it, then load test both of those using the same sorts of tests. Comparing a highly-optimized single-purpose application to a general-purpose portal platform is not a fair test.
Also: Even though the article says "Even the most ardent PHP fans will admit that PHP is not designed with performance in mind," PHP performs damn well considering it's heritage, the fact that its primary platform is "a patchy server" and that it is FREE.
Why would one choose LAMP over
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Comparing Sharepoint to Zope is beyond silly.
Zope is an object relational application server, making it slower than anything else running standard DB's. Technologically wise Zope is ten years ahead of Sharepoint - this is payed for with performance hoging and heavy-weight memory usage. 2Gigs is not enough for running Zope/Plone in a serious production enviroment.
Sharepoint is a monolithic built-to-fit solution that was grown over the course of almost a decade and finally has turned into something that doesn't crash every odd hour and - at last - performs the way it was supposed to back in 2001.
Keeping in mind that Zope was allready working back in 2001 and actually hasn't changed all that much since then. The entire redo - Zop 3.0 - still is in developement.
Sharepoint is usually used for CMS purposes, while Zope is usually used for highly abstracted business application developement.
Nobody in his right mind would get the idea to build an ERP system with Sharepoint.
Bottom line:
These guys didn't know what they where testing.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I wish they had tested open source .NET apps against open source non .NET apps.
You really can't run sharepoint on public sites very easily or cheaply.
There are a number of open source .NET portals they could have tested including
DotNetNuke http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ VB.NET
Rainbow Portal http://www.rainbowportal.net/ C#
or my favorite
mojoPortal http://www.mojoportal.com/ C# and also can run on linux with Mono
To test the .Net stack, we ran Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL Server 2005 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Across the board, this configuration performed very well, with the top overall average throughput (by far) at 4.59M bps.
Quick check.....
$2,792.00 (Froogle Directron) Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise, 25 Clients
$5,489.18 (Froogle Non Academic) SQL Server 2005 Complete
$5,619.00 (MS Website Retail) SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Server License with 5 CALs
$1,124.00 (Dell) Suse Enterprise Linux 9 With Server Hardwarex ?c=us&cs=555&l=en&oc=MLB1580&s=biz Couldn't find Suse Enterprise 10
Integrated LAMP Stackhttp://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpris eserver/lamp.html
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp
Hmmm, Could train a couple of Windows Admins with $11,000. Better yet just Hire a good Linux Admin.
To a large degree, we credit this strong showing to the high level of integration that exists among the components of this stack. While most of the open-source and Java systems are developed independently of each other, each of the .Net components is designed specifically to integrate and perform well together.
Even if the .Net stack had bombed convincingly in these tests, it would probably still maintain popularity in many companies.
Some people (PHBs) will never come around.
But its strong showing should give companies confidence that the .Net stack will handle most high-level enterprise needs.
For more than $12Grand it better blow away the Free Alternatives and configure itself and require zero admin.
I know I will get slammed for not using TCO but I don't believe those numbers at all. In my experience it takes the same amount of time for day to day maintenance. And when there is a problem (and there will be, no matter which one you choose) It costs me less time and therefore money to bring back up the Linux box.
Cost is not the only factor in a buying decision but is a factor, and if performance is arguably equal than it is a huge factor.
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No, but I have considered running the Linux distro in it. For one, Ubuntu Server only has a command line and I don't know how I'd go about making it run there, and secondly I only need a few ports for the web server (80, 21, 22, maybe 1-2 more?). That would be a good solution, but the PC is a 667 MHz one and I don't know how well it can take it. I might put some memory on it and try it, though, it sounds like a good solution.
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http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/ I wonder how Con's patch would do in these tests. There are two patches, one for servers, and one for desktops. They make the box uber faster for its purpose, but it sucks ass for the oposite. Get the patch for the server, and the server is snappy. The patch isn't perfect, however. I use it for my desky. It's swift.
Ignoring the unscientific test and lack of version numbers and configuration file details, the article did not have a graph showing hits per second per dollar. Why? --- Division by zero. .Net is not free by any stretch of imagination, even if the hardware is identical (and taken out of the cost equation).
Something I've wondered about and have started playing around with on my dev boxes is the performance/capabilities difference between running ASP.NET in an MS environment (win2k server + IIS, it's what I got) VS running ASP.NET on Mono (Linux (Ubuntu/RedHat) + Apache) if the performance is similer MS may soon find that they have totaly lost control of ASP.NET and it is now in the OSS wild.
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A curious mix of flawed logic, marketing waffle and technical language.
.. mix of a Windows server and open-source components .. businesses should seriously consider the combo for their enterprise applications."
.Net stack performed very well in our tests, clearly showing the benefits of the tight integration among each of the stack components"
.. JBoss Portal on Windows performed considerably better than JBoss on .. CentOS"
.Net components is designed specifically to integrate and perform well together"
.. on Windows .., no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators"
"Probably most surprising was the solid performance that came from the
fud.alert: LAMP runs better on Windows.
Why would anyone move to Windows to use Open Source? Don't you still have to pay per simultaneous connection.
"Microsoft's
How does 'tight integration', which is a function of how easy the sysop maintains the system, affect the efficiency of a running 'stack'. Does the stack know it is better 'integrated' and therefore runs like a happy bunny?
"JBoss Portal is relatively immature
fud.injection: JBoss on CentOS is immature. JBoss on Windows is better.
"we credit this strong showing to the high level of integration that exists among the components of this stack. While most of the open-source and Java systems are developed independently of each other, each of the
fud.injection: open-source and Java don't perform well together. Open Source runs better under Windows. Oh please Mr. Manager don't move off that Windows boxen.
"Neither the open-source nor the Windows communities seem to be able to accept a marriage of open-source server components and Windows operating systems"
What licensing restriction do the current ms.EULA put on Open Source projects developed with\and for Windows? Name any possible benefit that would be obtained by running Open Source on Windows? And don't mention the ease of use GUI. A proper sysop writes scripts to maintain the system.
"there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source
How by any logic is it easier on Windows? This totally fails the logic test. Apache on Windows requires the same kind of config as Linux. Name any Open Source app that is easier to maintain under Windows. Provide concrete examples not opinion.
"JBoss on Windows far outpacing its Linux brethren"
I'm sure Marc Fleury would be interested in how Microsoft managed to get JBoss running faster on Windows.
"Enterprise IT managers shouldn't hesitate to look into the option of deploying open-source stacks on a Windows Server platform."
Yea, remember you still have your yearly tithe to pay Redmond. That's five seperate times in that article that you advised people to stick to 'open-source' on Windows. I do believe we have now all fully gotten the sub.text.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Yes, and those are actually good rules of thumb.
/. or anywhere else) happens to agree with reality.
And it shouldn't be surprising when popular opinion (on
Now, I know that Plone is a dog, and XOOPS may be popular on Sourceforge, but I don't think it's the most obvious choice for building a high performance portal using PHP. So, using these two as the basis for testing is silly.
The fact that JBoss Portal on Windows outpaces JBoss Portal on Linux has a simple reason: JBoss isn't fully open source; crucial parts of it (namely the Java runtime itself) are under Sun's control, and hell will freeze over before Sun bothers to do a good job implementing Java for their competitors' Linux systems.
As for things generally running faster on Windows, that's implausible. Differences between raw Windows and Linux system performance are at most in the single digit percentages, so if they saw any significant differences between the same applications running on top of the two platforms, either the application vendor spends more time tuning for Windows (as in Sun Java), or the testing labs screwed up.
In fact, the whole test is really ill conceived: none of the "portals" they compared provide the same functionality; it just doesn't make sense to test them against each other. Overall, this test mostly seems to test the competency of eWeek, and they aren't doing too well.
Microsoft has gotten so big that they are in the impossible position of trying to keep everyone happy.
No, they aren't in that situation, they put themselves into that situation. And that is exactly what is wrong with Microsoft: they want to be everything to everybody. They want their software to run everything. They want everything to be the same, uniform, for all users, for all applications, for the world.
Trying to create a universal operating system isn't just bad from a free market point of view, it's simply bad engineering. And because of Microsoft's monopolistic hold on the market, we all have to pay the price for their bad engineering.
Face it: Microsoft just can't win.
Sure they can. They can split up, and half a dozen mini-Microsoft's can compete separately in different markets, developing different solutions. Or, at least, they can stop trying to force a single solution down everybody's throat.
But, you're right, as long as Microsoft keeps up what they are doing, they will be criticized simultaneously as creating bloated software, as adding too many new features, and as being not innovative enough. And even though you may think that those statements are mutually contradictory, they are not; for each criticism, there is a large population of users for which it is true, and the only way to address that is for Microsoft to stop trying to be everything to everybody.
Hopefully this isn't too off-topic:
What are your experiences with the hardware requirements for successfully running Windows in a VM?
I'm thinking of trying the free version of VMWare on my Linux machine (running Kubuntu) so I can use some CAD programs that are unfortunately Windows-only; I think it'll be easier than spending a lot of time tweaking Wine, which I've had some mixed results with in the past. (Interestingly, I had better results with TG's Cedega for games, though.)
I don't mean what the bare-minimum requirements are for it, I'm thinking more of "comfortable" use. People allude to it being RAM-hungry, but I'm trying to get an idea of how much more RAM, if any, I'll need to buy. (Right now I have a P4 workstation with a paltry 512MB in it -- although surprisingly it rarely needs to swap during normal usage, even with KDE. =P )
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ok here's the problem. Most posts I've seen point out how great linux is. I don't think linux users take criticism well. If you all feel that the benchmark is wrong, do one yourself. Prove its close or faster. I have serious trouble believing that WAMP is faster than LAMP myself. I do think a properly configured ASP.NET/IIS server vs a linux/apache server would show dynamic content faster on the windows box. The reason is most open source languages require you to do a lot of research and read to get real performance. Anyone can sit down with .NET and get something quick running. This IS a flaw in open source and it needs to be addressed with better documentation and developers realizing they need to attract everyone. Having a hard to configure piece of software or hard to use library doesn't make you a good programmer. It makes you a bad programmer. Some linux users want more people to use linux and that means the TARGET AUDIENCE has changed. Software must be updated to cope with it. Further, I personally feel a linux/unix box takes more setup time than a Windows server even counting registry tweaks and configuration adjustments most windows admins ignore. The advantage is if the box is going to stay that way for a long time. In that case, linux/unix win hands down because configurations don't change with good software. This does not hold true for linux on desktops though. Graphical environments often require crazy upgrade procedures and often break resulting in a recompile of the whole damn system. (yes gnome developers, i'm talking about you)
Further, the real problem is the open source technologies for web development are lacking. Ruby on rails has promise. Like many open source problems, there are too many languages and little consensus. I won't bother complaining about PHP again because people who need to listen don't. Its not as user friendly and consistant as ASP nor is the documentation. (as a brief summary)
Performance can be a real world issue. If someone is on a limited hardware budget and can't just throw hardware at the problem like many linux people tend to do, its a big problem.
Cost of ownership (TCO) is relative. When Microsoft promotes TCO many scream their heads off on slashdot. Its not cheaper to run commerical linux over windows. Last I checked suse or redhat charge around the same for a license as microsoft. (especially when you don't need a rediculous number of users.. aka small to medium businesses and individuals) Yes, they could download gentoo or whatever. When I look at cost, I look at the cost to get a sysadmin (windows ones are cheaper), the cost of the hardware (usually same), the cost of the software and the amount of time spent on administration during the life of the system. Redhat has just as many patches as Microsoft does. Watch their list sometime. You can argue there are less (insert your system component here), but a good sysadmin updates everything on the box that could possibly get executed/exploited not just what he uses. If you can't delete notepad or X11, you must update it. It can mean the difference between someone on your box and someone with root on your box. Most os vendors ship a similar number of patches if you count software that is optional but still dangerous. (apple, microsoft, sun, etc)
Terms and vendor support are where you start to make sense. Microsoft has poor support. Oracle claims redhat does. My personal experience has been that the linux community is rude on forums and other types of support.
I've professionally administered several types of servers, and to this day I still think FreeBSD is the cheapest server platform. I recommend/use windows as a webserver or file server only.
Depends on your school, I guess, but the average comp sci student at mine would already know Emacs, GCC, a Lisp derivative or two, and BSD/Linux. I literally never once saw Visual Studio on a comp sci lab machine.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've used ZOPE and Plone and always found it to be the most sluggish and egregiously complex environment I've ever tried to support anywhere.
This is sad because I generally like Python.
In our environment I found that a Plone installation for an internal IT collaboration and documentation server (accessed by roughly 100 people in a company with about 5000 employess) was sluggish even after little tweaks and tuning that could manage.
I eventually gave up on that and installed Mediawiki (the PHP based engine that serves Wikipedia). That, with no tuning, has been a far faster and easier to use environment.
(If the user interface of Plone had been sufficiently compelling I might have invested the energy and devoted the extra hardware to putting it on a cluster using ZEO; but the real reason I'd switched was because we needed something more like a wiki with LDAP authentication support than a CMS; the performance issues were a nuisance but rather incidental to the selection process).
So, if I was Mindcraft and I wanted to generate plenty of sensationalistic traffic, then I couldn't find a better choice than Plone on Linux to compare it to anything else on any other platform. Because, as far as I can tell, Plone is going to just suck compared to practically any other "stack."
If I was a real-world admin (which I am, actually) then my choice of architecture or platform is going to be based on such factors as: availability, compatibility with third party libraries and tools, familiarity of my developers, cost (and scalability of cost, etc. I'll recommend putting together a minimal installation and load testing framework and implementing just enough of the application to drive a stake in the ground (to borrow from the extreme programming terminology here). In other words performance is weighted in terms of "good enough" (where good enough is defined as --- for our application and within our target market with enough head room to account for some "slashdot" events).
There's generally problems with "benchmark" articles written and published by people without any real-world applications deployment and maintenance experience, and by people who don't solicit advice or feedback by real experts. Of course, it seems that such articles are usually written with an agenda that difference from the real interests of the bulk of their readership. Whether that agenda is to promote a particular vendor or even just to irritate enough people to generate lots of irate "page hits" is irrelevant.
"Microsoft beats Linux" has become the IT press' equivalent of "if it bleeds it leads." It's the hallmark of the high tech tabloid.
Exceptional claims require exceptional proof.
What else is there to say? Partially it's a matter of trust, of course. I don't trust MS, so I'm skeptical of anything that says they are good. I trust Apple in some ways, and not in others. If you praise the design of Apple, I won't demand proof. Especially if the design you are praising is esthetic, as opposed to software or interface. (Apple *used* to have the best interface design...but somewhere along the way they lost all those designers.) If you praise Apple's pricing, I'll want to see proof. Linux is nearly Apple in reverse. I accept praises of technical design without checking, but if you praise esthetics... I need proof. (OTOH, Linux is SO highly variable, that you can find nearly anything if you go looking, even esthetic designs. And over time they tend to dominate, so these days both KDE and Gnome *look* pretty...in most default configurations.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's true there's a market for a professional IDE like Visual Studio but the very act of porting something is a punch to the profit groins; it would take much work to port a project the size of VS. Microsoft would also have to port its building toolchain, its .NET platform, its web services/server/etc. platform, its debugger, and so on. Then Microsoft, as a professional company also in the licensing market, would have to support it.
Also, a large *nix server market doesn't necessarily make up a substantial portion of the developers market *nix VS would target. Microsoft would also have win hearts and minds; the *nix platform thrives on open-source. VS doesn't.
Pelé!
I've now read the 'article' 4 times, and can find no description of the tests anywhere. Sure, there's a blog mentiones, but there's nothing anywhere! HOW ON EARTH are readers supposed to add to these results.
Shall I now go off and write a fictional article about how wonderful LAMP is and desctibe the results of the tests I ran on my (purely finctional) quad opterons that I have racked up at home???
There is absolutely no credibility to this article. How did it ever get published?
Yup. Here's a link to their list of officially supported operating systems. Includes three flavors of Windows, two flavors of Linux, and VMware.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Apache bloated : Film at 11!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Default for MySQL on Linux: low RAM shared use box, minimal RAM use. Default for MySQL on Windows: ask some questions about use and make fair use of the resources of the system. On the Linux box you have to copy a sample configuration file by hand and that step wasn't in the installation instructions.
Net result: use default MySQL and you get a setup that inherently strongly favors Windows, because Windows setup is optimzed while the other isn't.
I don't know whether they made this mistake or not. If they did, as it appears from their results, the comparisons that include a database component are meaningless.
Does this include the per head licensing fee in comparison to using Samba?
The 2003 article Is the Portal Dead? discusses Gartner's announcement that "the portal is dead, long live the portal." And more recently, Portals are Dead reiterates that. But of course, there's plenty more about the death of the portal.
I've played with Plone a little bit, and it is resource intensive, to say the least. However, when you look at their graphs, eweek ran plone under both Windows Server 2003 and Suse Enterprise Linux. Given that they used the built-in Zope application server as the web server for Plone under both Windows and Linux, I would expect the performance to be equivalent.
When you look at the graphs, Plone on Windows appeared to outperform Plone on Linux by an order of magnitude. Something smelled funny. Like debugging.
While I'm not sure how Suse configures their Plone packages, by default, the Zope packages come with debugging turned on, which cripples performance. If you look at Chapter 2 of the Plone Book by Andy McKay, it states:
If I were running an enterprise which needed to use something with the features and robustness of Plone, and was about to devote the hundreds (or thousands) of hours required to fill it with content, and tweak it to my heart's content, I'd read the [expletive deleted] documentation, and notice that I might need to turn off debug mode. Sure, eweek said that they wanted to keep everything untuned:
Too bad that they didn't turn Zope debugging on in Windows, just to be consistent.
This is not a complex tuning or advanced configuration issue. You don't need to use eye of newt, or sacrifice small animals on the night of a full moon to make this simple change. If debug was left on in Linux, it not only invalidates their results, it also shows their conclusions to be utter garbage. A big part of their conclusion that open source software worked better on Windows was based on the Plone example (the best "apples to apples" comparison in their entire test). Eweek said:
Probably most surprising was the solid incompetence that came from the testers, and the failure to configure anything other than a Windows server in spite of readily accessible documentation on setting up these complex systems. The sad part is that some IT managers will rely on these flawed results.Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
LAMP used to stand for
.Net) is that LAMP so far has always come ahead with atleast a magnitude (even after tweaking the bejezus out of both systems.) But thats me so I look at this performance article as not quite true.
Linux
Apache
MySQL
PHP (possibly Perl)
And as far as I know JBoss is Java and Python.. how should I put it nicely... is dog slow.
My experience with both pure LAMP deployments and IIS/MSSQL/ASP deployments (not
I really disagree with you there.
Getting linux webserver up and running with Linux was a snap. W2k3 server onthe other hand was a pain with IIS.
IIS virtual hosts suck, clean URLs anybody? I don't want to buy a 300 dollar program to go over my logs. on and on.
took me a full day of trying various options with IIS. I ended up removing IIS and installing mysql and apache. 10 minutes later I was back in the game.
oh and defaults on linux are decent.
I think windows needs to have documentation that is 1.useful 2.technical (not marketing material) 3. EASY TO FIND
Try to edit apache's configuration, you will find that the config file documents what every single option and their values do. The configuration for God's sake is self documenting, what more can you ask!
And you most likely will only need to tweak how many threads you want to run. That's about it.
Do I even have these options for IIS.
Oh and another thing. Under load w2k feels slower. No I do have benchmarks to back up with numbers, but that would not be needed as you do not achieve snappines as with linux server.
So in conclusion, choose whatever works for you. Make sure to select technology which does the task good enough and something you are most comfortable with. Even 20% performance loss isn't relevant when it comes to make other issues such as your team not feeling comfortable with the product or you not being able to deliver when needed.
The interesting stats about the amount of data pushed out by the application server was silly... have you ever view-sourced a sharepoint page and seen the ugly code generated by sharepoint and all the session stuff?
I'm finding it kind of hard to take the article seriously.
.Net moniker so aggressively in so many areas that it became difficult to figure out exactly what the term meant. But, as all the irrational exuberance that comes with a failed marketing blitz finally pulled back, .Net went back to being what it was originally intended to be: the name of Microsoft's server and service stack.
.Net is not "the name of Microsoft's server and service stack". It is an application framework. What is a "server and service stack"?
What is an IT Stack? Is that where you go on a team building exercise and have to make a pyramid (with sys admins at the bottom)?
or quotes like this:
A few years ago, microsoft threw around the
First sentence is fine. Second isn't.
In fact, why has eWeek decided to call everything a "stack"?
Equally (and they do acknowledge this), it seems to be much more a test of particular applications.
I understand the need to dumb things down a little, but seriously.
meh
But of course since MS keeps moving the posts, embraces and extends everything (so their APIs and "standards" are a moving target) I hasten to suggest that to have a full replacement is made impossibly by the lack of interoperability of MS products.
Lets say, for the sake of argument, that AD supports all other platforms equally well, still we know how MS deals with security isues (badly), and interoperability (half heartedly).
Thus I reckon AD should remain a Windows only solution, LDAP/kerberos/NIS+ can be used for other platforms and if necessary some glue can be used to make both solutions talk to each other, but no sane enterprise should entrust their most valuable infrastrucutre to a tool that is basically a black box.
Ask MS how they deal with private keys in AD, typical security by obscurity, ready to be harvested by a hacker with access to your registry.
While Windows 2003 64bit exists and runs well on the hardware, there is nothing worth running on it except maybe SQL Server 2000/2005 64 bit.
This is from personal experience in the last month with a round of server replacements.
Exchange does not run on 64 bit Windows 2003.
Exchange does not like to talk to a 64 bit Windows 2003 AD and global catalog. It ignored it and moaned constantly.
MS ISA 2004 and 2006 (yes the brand new version) does not run on 64 bit Windows. Says so in the installer and the documents on the ISA sub-site.
32 bit AD servers are iffy about talking to 64 bit AD servers. Although Enterprise 2003 AD servers are iffy about Standard 2003 AD servers, so that could just be versioning issues.
So in spite of the huge amount of push MS has given 64 bit, it isn't possible to run an AD-based network with ISA and Exchange on it.
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