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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.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
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.
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 .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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree. In fact, I'm a fan of a lot of Microsoft stuff. (*ducks*) I've developed systems that were blazing fast and were written with .NET.
I'm just saying that, in this case, the benchmark is completely useless. It would be like conducting a drug trial to determine if a particular drug works, but letting the participants also take any other drugs they want in addition to smoking some crack on the weekends.
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?
I also use a WIMP setup
Someone needs to be fired in the marketing department...
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.
.net 2.0 naitvely supports x86, x64, and ia64, fyi.
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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 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).
You'd be wrong. When another user remotely logs in, it logs anyone sitting at the terminal off.
Are you asking why MS doesn't port it to Linux? I'd think the answer to that is fairly obvious.
Really? What is it? I thought the VS teams job was to promote the use [and purchase] of VS and not prop up Windows sales.
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.
Good point. However, to say that Win64 is better than Win32 would require you to say Linux is better too than win32 [for basically the same reasons].
As for the "costs". It creeps up. When you need site licenses for Windows, Office, VS, etc, etc, etc you end up paying millions of dollars a year.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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
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.
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
Because unless you're on the same network there is considerable lag for remote controlling system (Windows or Linux). You say your desktop is overpowered an underutilized, but if you turn your laptop into a dumb terminal, than you're laptop will be overpowered and underutilized, will it not? The fact is that most people don't WANT anyone else use the computer at the same time they are. Remember, you are the EXCEPTION not the rule.
It used to be quite the opposite. It's the exception now because DOS [and most of windows] was single-user and became so damn wide spread. If the IBM-PC shipped with UNIX instead of MS-DOS we'd be telling a different story today.
Most people don't even KNOW they can run multiple users at a time on their computer let alone are motivated enough to do it. This is because Windows culture breeds contempt for choice and ignorance all around. It's apparently "better" to be naive and controlled then knowledgeable and decisive.
Again, you're an exception case here. 99% of home user's DON'T CARE about remote shells.
Again people just don't know the power of it.
I agree, quite a few probably, but probably not enough to make it economically viable; that is, sales wouldn't cover the cost to port, test, maintain and support the Linux version. I'm not sure how kdevelop is a clone of VS, as it didn't seem to function anything like VS. Kdevelop was one of those frustrations I talked about in another story.
You'll never know unless they actually try. I think it would be sellable and there would be enough of a market. The trick is they actually have to make it and support it. Of course the irony of it is that the cost of porting it is higher because they use platform dependent GUI widgets and other elements [threads, etc].
So the very thing that locks customers into Windows, locks Microsoft into Windows as well. It hinders their ability to take their independent products and branch them out. VS shouldn't exist to prop windows up, it should exist to make software development easier.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That's the beauty of the Microsoft culture. Had they used GTK+ or QT or god forid ported GDI to Linux they'd be set. But because they use their platform dependent system and user libraries they lock themselves into their own damn OS.
.net crap and what not, at least not at first. I'd pay a decent coin just for the IDE and integration with GCC/GDB. The editor [and the RAD tools] are actually very well put together (at least for VC6, the later VSes are less and less friendly IMHO) and useful.
And note, they wouldn't have to port all the
Kdevelop sucks because it makes horrible looking projects by default and requires KDE libs (I hate KDE in general).
Jedit is about the best thing down [in OSS land]. It requires Java and ANT but runs pretty much anywhere and has decent source editing tricks.
The trick is MSFT would have to work with others. I mean GCC and GDB already exist, why not profit from that?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.