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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 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
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.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Because I don't feel like paying $1500 per machine for Windows 2003 server on every server in my web farm. Shit, that's twice as much as the servers I'd run it on! Grid computing and server farms are very poorly suited to a commercial operating system.
If M$ wins, its fud and was paid for.
/rant
It isn't as if they haven't been caught buying studies before. So the distrust is well justified.
Plain and simple fact is if Microsoft could compete with the usefulness of a solid Linux distro their product would speak for itself. In some cases this is true but in essentially all technical senses Microsoft is just a plain loser.
Most of Microsofts problems is that they don't listen to the customers. I mean sure they listen to Dell, RIAA, MPAA, maybe even IBM and other big wigs. But what about us users? What does WGA give me in terms of a useful feature? What does the bloat that is WMP give me over a simpler mplayer? Why must they invent their own file formats [e.g. Office files, WMV, WMA] that are proprietary instead of using or establishing more open standards? etc, etc, etc.
Everything MSFT does is to benefit the stock holders through locking the "customers" into their system. Use our OS, use our office suite, use our media tools, use our development tools. All the while they ignore any sense of established standards [ISO C99 anyone?] which make interoperability a bitch for Windows users. There is simply no reason why MSFT uses these awful platform dependent libraries. Take DirectX for instance. On any OTHER platform you combine Allegro with OpenGL and have essentially the same thing [just 1/10th the size and in C]. But no, we must use the DX "experience" because somehow the hype makes it shinier!
I know what I'm saying is "no duh", but you seemed to be hinting that MSFT hatred is not warranted. Us "OSS" users don't hate MSFT because it's better. We hate it because it lulls people into a sense of superiority when all it does is move to separate them from their money. It creates nightmares for us who chose to chose.
I mean I can save an OpenOffice document on my Gentoo box and my friend can open it in FreeBSD with OpenOffice [or whatever]. Why can't I save an Office document and open it in Linux? Why can't Office work in Linux anyways? Seems Linux distros have GUIs, widgets, networking, fonts, etc. There really is no technical reason why Office can't work in Windows, oh I know, because MSFT uses it as a reason to buy Windows.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Actually, I have a preference to individually installed and maintained components.
.Net 2.0, I'm stuck with Windows 2003 running on x86.
For instance, if I write my code to run on PHP and MySQL, I can swap out the underlying OS and web server. I could run it on a Linux box, Sun blade server, Dell running Windows, Xserve running OS X server... it's kinda nice.
If I go with
Plus, if each piece is seperate, it's less likely that any one piece will bring the whole OS down. I like being able to SSH to a box and just restart httpd (I'm assuming you can do similar under a Win32 server, just don't have much experience.)
Plus, it's also nice for development. At work, our servers are Red Hat Linux running apache, PHP, and MySQL. My workstation runs XP. I installed Apache, MySQL, and PHP on my XP box to test new versions as I develop them. It's kinda nice having the flexibility of using the very portable OSS stack on Windows (or anything else, for that matter). We've used old Win98 machines, an old G3 towers running OS X.1, laptops running Linux, etc. as test servers.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
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?
The difference being: Linux zealots post cooked results for free, because they just hate Microsoft that much.
Unfortunately, posting it slashdot doesn't make it true. I've seen multiple shootouts where MS products outperform competing OSS products. In a very technical sense.
If it decreases Windows piracy then it decreases the cost of Windows for everyone who purchases it legally. So not a feature per se, but a price discount.
It (arguably) integrates better with IE than mplayer does with Firefox. At least, judging by the last time I ran mplayer/Firefox on Linux. It also comes installed out-of-the-box on Windows systems. That's a feature you may not value, but lots of novice Windows users do.
Because the standard lacks something they want included. Or, because they don't want to lock themselves in to supporting future aspects of the standard that their customers don't value.
Newsflash: Everything every publically held company does should be to benefit the stock holders.
It could, if there was any advantage to Microsoft in porting it. There isn't.
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?
Justified perhaps, but automatically accurate... not necessarily.
Ok, fanboy.
So when MS doesn't add new features they are slammed for not innovating enough, and when they do add new features they are slammed for contributing to bloat that you don't want. People bitched about IE6 not having tabs, etc. Firefox came out and MS finally realized it had to update IE so it added a lot of features people were asking for and the most-heard comment on Slashdot after IE7b2 was released was "it's ugly". Face it: Microsoft just can't win.
You sorta' answered yourself there.
Not every product is a winner. MS historically doesn't release every single product as a beta and quietly stop promoting the ones that suck. Instead they release final versions and some fall on their face. No company has a perfect record.
The problem is not that criticism isn't warranted, it's that MS can't win no matter what. If they release a weak or buggy product they get slammed, but if they take too long to release they get slammed. If they don't add new features they get slammed, but if they add new features it's called bloat. If an MS product gets bad reviews the reviewers are being honest, but if they get good reviews the reviewers are obviously being paid. For years MS got slammed for security issues, and they beefed up SP2 and suddenly there were waves of "but it broke my application" complaints. The list goes on.
Microsoft has gotten so big that they are in the impossible position of trying to keep everyone happy. I'm not particularly a Microsoft "fan", but I hate this wanton "Micro$oft is teh suxors!1!" b.s. OSS fanboys need to grow up and realize that Microsoft can't go back in time and correct the sins of the past, and since it is a monopoly it can't just genuinely screw its customers and break every file/application by releasing a new version of Windows that corrects all the problems of the old versions but offers no legacy support. They have a tough balancing act to do and, while they're not perfect, they're getting better.
"#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?" If there's a 7x difference in performance between linux and Win2k3, then the difference is almost certainly nothing to do with systems themselves, and everything to do with configuring it. LAMP is very susceptible to speed-ups by optimizing the configuration, and if they picked the right 'WAMP' stack it would come pre-optimized without their knowledge?
That's a poor analogy. Microsoft software is a Ferrari, and by comparison Open Source is a Mini? I don't think so.
A better analogy is this, because they refused to do any tuning on the OSS technologies: They bought a Mustang GT and a Nissan 350z and put them in a race. Then they told the driver of the Nissan that he could only use first and second gear. It would be nice if the Nissan was so dramatically superior that it could win even with that handicap, but since even a Ferrari would lose to a Mustang GT with just two forward gears at its disposal, it didn't happen.
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).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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
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.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Does Vista come with an Office suite? Development Tools? Research tools? etc...
and if they did, they would be done for 'abusing their monopoly in the OS market to enter other markets' etc..
Perhaps the phrase "they cant do anything right" is true?
The problem is if you piss off enough people by stupid lockin tricks you lose customers.
The only big reason I like Linux distros [in particular Gentoo] is because *I* have control of what goes on. I don't have to install bloaty software if I don't want. I can backup my OS as I choose. I can tweak my kernel [and I have actually done that on occasion].
Whenever I install windows, it takes 2-3 hours [to go from SP1 to fully patched], have to deal with license keys which may or may not work [even though I buy shrink wrapped copies], don't get any development tools, research tools and the thing still takes more than 2GB.
I mean really think about it. In your install of XP what do you have that makes you able to work as any sort of professional? There are no office tools, no development tools, no media tools [other than the shitty WMP which you have to download anyways], no research tools, nothing but solitaire and WGA. Hell even the shell [cmd.exe] is total shit.
It's only a matter of time until more and more professionals wake up and make the move. And what does MSFT have to answer that with? Oh look, an Aero like GUI in Vista! Please...
I'd be totally willing to stick with Windows for my desktops [the ones I control at least] if they took their field seriously.
Let's see, do I want a cross-platform Office suite, or another Clippy update?
Do I want a competent shell? Or a.... well nothing.
Do I want a standards compliant compiler? Or C# which has limited support anywhere but on Windows.
Do I want etc...
Even people who ONLY say do office work can appreciate the benefits of OSS tools. Not just in the sense you're not paying huge license fees but in the sense that your documents are not locked into some tool chain. In 10 years your OpenOffice files will be just as free to be opened and moved around as they are today. Can you say the same about your WinXP files? You think Windows Vista2010 will let you install Office97?
hehehehe, cute.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Even if that was true I'd still rather have a proper UNIX environment anyways. Not to mention a real multi-user OS without shelling out huge dollars. Oh and the development tools and ...
... you're wasting your money.
Sorry, but with modern windows, what exactly is missing that dis-qualifies it from being a real multi-user OS? And FWIW, I've found VS2005 to be much better than any development studio I've tried for linux.
If you buy Windows to run AMP servers
So you think its better to have servers which don't integrate with your corporate network? $400 for Web edition isn't a whole lot to anyone running web farms.
Linux and BSD are more efficient to work with in server contexts
Your opinion, there's no fact to that. I replace my linux server at home with SBS 2003 because its easier to manage the network using SBS2003 than it was with Linux + SMB.
work better with 64-bit processors [Win64 is a huge compatibility joke atm]
I've heard quite differently; indeed, some people claim XP64 is the best desktop OS, even better than 32bit XP. I don't think the 64 bit servers are suffering huge problems either.
don't require you to call India each time your HD breaks and you need a re-install.
A bunch of FUD here; mearly replacing an HD doesn't require calling anyone, and alot of shops image the drives every night so that if there is a failure, they slap on the saved image and are up and running again in no time.
Heck, in BSD/Linux doing a ghost of your system is as simple as burning a tarball to a DVD.
You can easily save an image of a Windows installtion as well.
No need for 3rd party ghosting tools and praying that Windows lets you "get away with" using your OS...
Go ahead and spend hours and hours tarballing your server; the fact is that it would be faster to just create an image of the HD and burn that to a DVD. There's no praying involved; my former employer had great success doing such restores. And putting down a new image is faster than un-tarring a file to disk again.
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.
Windows is not a true multi-user OS unless you get the Pro editions. Other editions let you have users but not all logged in at the same time [even though the kernel would support it].
... why doesn't it work in Linux?
... um use NFS in Linux. It's a single line to setup [on either side] and handled natively in the kernel.
... if you have 64-bit drivers. Many proprietary [the standard for Windows] drivers are not yet ported to win64. The win32 thunking layer is barely functional.
... hmm ...
I was fairly certain the Home edition of XP lets more than one user log in at a time. It would seem odd that only Pro supports it, since usually Pro is part of a domain (and when it is, doesn't let more than one user at a time login.. but this makes sense).
As for VS2005
Are you asking why MS doesn't port it to Linux? I'd think the answer to that is fairly obvious.
As for SMB
I did use NFS for filesharing in Linux; but that doesn't help when you also have Windows clients, does it? And its more than a one line configuration. I was using SMB as a full domain controller as well, not just for filesharing. It wasn't easy to manage windows workstations using SMB as the domain controller.
As for win64
How is this different to poor driver support with Linux? Doesn't the blame go to the hardware manufacturers? Isn't that who's always blamed when Linux doesn't support X device? This claim doesn't back up the '64bit windows is a joke' theory.
If you ever have to re-install a copy of Windows [from the CD] you will likely have to call India to get a new product key. At least that's been my experience.
For home users yes this is an issue. but in the business world, you typically have volume license keys, which don't require activation. Also, you're usually NOT restoring from the cd that windows ships on, you're much more likely restoring from your last system backup.
As for ghosting, yeah I never said you can't ghost in Windows, I said you had to pay for it. In OSS world you can just rsync your disk to filestore somewhere else. Free tools that are work perfectly
rsync, you actually use that gaping security hole of a progam? I have to ask, when all is said and done, who cares if you have to pay for ghosting software? Really? Some poor college kid might, but I think for businesses ghosting software is the least of the cost of running.
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.
they happen to be the largest social networkign site out there. I would be willing to bet they know what they are doing.
It's the largest not because of superior techies or web developers, but because it was very thoughtfully designed in the "pen and paper" phase. All the automatic "friends" linking up, the easy-interface page personalization... it's hugely popular for the exact same reasons Google became popular. And also because all the glam rock (and emo) bands happened to make it their hangout -- that was one of the main snowball effects in the whole story -- it became a trendy place to be, not just convenient.
Actually... overall the site works pretty smoothly (and yeah I have a homepage there, purely for fun and practical sociology), but at least once a week (and I don't visit every day) some of the functionalities are either dead dog slow or won't respond at all (which I don't mind at all). (Okay, enough excusing.)
Well yeah it would be strange if they didn't know what they are doing -- but what you pointed out isn't really evidence either way.
Sorry, but with modern windows, what exactly is missing that dis-qualifies it from being a real multi-user OS? And FWIW, I've found VS2005 to be much better than any development studio I've tried for linux.
:)
;)
/etc or /var. It's not like you're stuck with tar either - disk imaging still works fine. When you can tarball up only the parts of the machine you need to keep, the idea of disk imaging seems redundant (for most cases).
I think the grandparents point is that though it is technically a multi-user OS, it isn't a very good one. The kernel level schedulers on Windows give a really poor response under multiple sources of medium to heavy load.
I'm not aware of that many "development studios" for Unix. There's a couple, like eclipse and such, but many Unix writers tend to work a different way. In line with the Unix philosophy (rules 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 if you're interested) there's a lot of people who keep the editor, compiler, linker etc all seperate. If you're looking for a "development studio" for Unix, I think you're looking for the wrong thing. We don't have a Start Menu either.
So you think its better to have servers which don't integrate with your corporate network? $400 for Web edition isn't a whole lot to anyone running web farms.
Well, I'm sure anyone could have pointed out that large companies with large budgets can afford the $400 dollar cost. But that $400 dollars is a cost, and to a lot of companies, it's a big cost. It's an even bigger cost when many difference licences have to be purchased. (Obviously, Unixes have costs of their own, but the costs tend to increase in line with the use being made, or the complexity of the "solution" etc, and up-front licences payments (which are immoral, in my opinion) normally end up being a far less weildy solution than Free Unix is) And in my, and the grandparents opinion, it's an unjustified cost.
Your opinion, there's no fact to that. I replace my linux server at home with SBS 2003 because its easier to manage the network using SBS2003 than it was with Linux + SMB.
Of course it's opinion! The whole damn subject is opinion! As if a (very very poorly run) test on the speed of a server is the last word on the subject! There's little universal fact to your personal experience either.
I've heard quite differently; indeed, some people claim XP64 is the best desktop OS, even better than 32bit XP. I don't think the 64 bit servers are suffering huge problems either.
Have you actually used it? WinXP 64bit really doesn't work very well at all. I wouldn't know about 64 bit servers, but 64 bit WinXP is really not something that works very well.
Go ahead and spend hours and hours tarballing your server; the fact is that it would be faster to just create an image of the HD and burn that to a DVD. There's no praying involved; my former employer had great success doing such restores. And putting down a new image is faster than un-tarring a file to disk again.
It's possible to use either image or tar with Unixes. Tar is useful because it's easy to use diffs and delta compression on backups then. Tar's also useful when you only want to backup a certain area; such as