Slashdot Mirror
IBM Exec Says no Large Web Servers on Linux
Accidental
Angel writes "As reported in
InfoWorld, Tony
Occleshaw, IBM's software strategist for Europe, Middle
East, and Africa said at CeBIT today that
"No
one runs large, million-hits-per-day Web sites on Linux." "
Well, we served 640,000 pages on Wed on this Linux box. And the
server load is only 2.00-3.00. I figure this box can handle
around a million. The
adfu server (also Linux) did around a million hits total that day,
if you combine banner ads + layer HTML).
Some months ago I was 'portunate' enough to be
part of a team managing a major e=commerce
venture running OpenMarkets Transact on solaris
2.6. Admittedly the machine was initially poorely
configured, but the thing was still seriously
unstable, and it was running on two sun E3000s'.
Frankly for mission critical stuff I would go for
linux solely because I know the kind of probs it
can have, and canget community help to solve them.
It has NEVER crashed due to the web traffic. It has crashed a few times (4-5) during the last two years due to old, cheap and flaky hardware, but that's hardly something you can blame the OS for... (the little downtime there is doesn't warrant me buying new hardware yet)
At the same time, the machine serve as a mailserver, and as my personal toy machine for misc. web projects that involve frequent gcc compiles etc.
So Linux can't handle millions of hits a day?
The problems Slashdot have had in the past, I suspect are more a result of extremely dynamical pages. Most sites stick with a bit more static content.
Nobody's going to bet their business on tuning a server to meet the needs of the clients? I can tell you one thing, if that business gets popular, then they're royally screwed.
Linux and current hardware of the Intel IA32 or Alpha or Sparc generations have no problems saturating a 10 Mb connection for an entire day, week, or year. Of course, as you add in server side dynamic content, memory bandwidth and CPU requirements jump. It's the server manager's responsibility to make sure the hardware can meet the demands; if you need more CPU because you wrote scripts that require it, either tune your scripts or buy a faster CPU. Cluster your machines, do some DNS tricks, and farm out your web jobs. Perhaps invest in an SMP Alpha machine with plenty of I/O bandwidth an RAM. These are all server manager duties, and because so far the operating system has posed no problems, there is no call to "blame" the operating system for any of it.
I would love to debate your argument on purely technical terms, instead of hypothetical duties and theoretical loads, but you don't seem to present any technical arguments against Linux. In fact, I would classify all your current arguments as FUD, plain Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
There's your standard FUD. "Oh no, there was a HUMAN ERROR in the past, what would happen if we extrapolated that to some fantasy future scenario and blamed it on the COMPUTER? Things would be mighty scary, indeed! Run from Linux, it is all things evil!" I'll tell you what would happen if Linux was serving an e-commerce site. Since this company has a brain or two, they have a backup web server, mirrored RAID systems, and do nightly backups. The main box goes down, the system administrators' beepers go off, they run into work, and see that the backup has automatically taken over web services for IP www.xxx.yyy.zzz. They get the original web server back on its feet, do some internal testing, sync the disk contents, and turn it back on. They go back home.Say the company wasn't so smart, didn't have secondary machines, and had to deal with not meeting performance. The system administrators, knowing the server scripts and hardware, would then look for things to optimize. Perhaps the machine needs more RAM, so it gets it, and they go home.
If the machine isn't running in an hour, and the company loses a million dollars, then the system administrators are told they are now free to find other jobs.
Tell me where, in those situations or others you may know, where Linux was a limiting factor here (I can only touch these hypotheticals because I have never seen Linux fail to serve content becuase it was suffering from any operating system problems). Mr. Sergeant don't include a single example of where a server didn't meet its expected load; I can only assume he's being compensated for his words by some third party. I would love to find out where he works, and what he's done with his life, but last I checked, his posted web address simply fetched a nicely printed Microsoft ODBC database connection error.
I almost forgot to include your "inodes and shit" argument. Since no one here knows what you meant by that, and don't appear ready to explain, I can only guess that you are talking about maximum volume sizes of ext2 partitions on 32-bit machines. These are 32-bit architecture limitations, and here's a tip: get better hardware; buy an Alpha. Perhaps you want smaller inode _block_ sizes? Perhaps larger? Use a different filesystem, or at least give me a single, detailed, technical argument in favor of your sanity.
Everyone here is taking the approach that IBM is some sort of monolithic entity, as if one person at IBM being interviewed is speaking for IBM as a whole.
I really doubt this is the case. IBM is, IMHO, more like a bunch of companies flying in loose formation. And fighting much of the time.
If IBM had any unity at all, OS/2 might have beaten Windows on the desktop.
This is just a way for one Pointy-Haired Manager to say something that serves two purposes:
I doubt this person cares at all for how IBM does; he'll trade that away just to see his division out in front.
His idea of "burying the competition" means taking market share (or simply destroying the market share) of a division down the hall.
This is why everyone uses Windows instead of OS/2, and why, if IBM as a whole doesn't do something to deal with its unity problems, it'll wind up like Digital is now, IF they're lucky.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I think there are some scalability limitations with linux right now. The IBM dude was referring to (I hope for his credibility's sake anyway) milllionS of hits per day..like amazon.com type scalability. [I believe they use Alphas and Digital UNIX]..
Of course, one would wonder how many people require that kind of scale, but businesspeople are (rightly, so) anticipating insane scalability requirements over the next decade as the herd "gets on the Net".
While DejaNews does scale well, I think he's probably talking about more than database access here: we're talking commerce transactions and decision support systems (with complex querys).
There are some things that are so large that you'd probably *want* to buy a Sun or Alpha box. Solaris is an excellently designed OS (and the source code is available to prove it)... Linux on those boxes probably would do a decent job too.
Whether this will be true down the road (Linux 2.4/3.0) is another story.
This also isn't just about scale, it's about reliability. Nothing is completely reliable of course, even amazon.com goes down the odd time.. BUT.. Slashdot *HAS* had some noticable reliability problems in past (mostly due to MySQL if I recall correctly). Sun boxes are known for their reliability vs. Intel boxes where unless it's a 1st tier vendor you don't really know the quality.
just my 2c
-Stu
I dunno. I doubt a Pentium/90 sitting on a 128K ISDN line could serve millions of hits a day. But slap Apache in round-robin proxy mode in front of a cluster of Linux machines and you probably could.
Right tool for the right job -- don't expect a smallass Pentium to go up against big iron, whatever the operating system. But provided you're willing to throw the right hardware at it, Linux can compete against the "big boys" just fine.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
I do this every day. I run a site with millions of hits a day. It runs on Linux. It doesn't fall down -- day after day after day. High hit loads all the time. When we see 13 hits per second, we think that's low load. :^)
This
My company runs very large scale web sites on Linux right NOW. We
get millions of hits a day, and Linux handles the load perfect, without
complaint, and without problems or crashes. In fact, we use an Irix box
for a file server on some of the sites and THAT machine crashes
frequently.
As far as we are concerned, Linux is the best investment our
company has made. The machines it runs on are cheap and plentiful. The
operating system is low cost and very fast and reliable.
I think IBM is wrong when they say it shouldn't be used in these
situations.
In addition, we also use Linux on the desktop for almost all
employees. (There are a number of people in the company who need Word and
so they don't use Linux.)
This
I dunno, I run 4 FreeBSD boxes and think its the greatest thing since sliced bread but Linux drives me insane and mystifies me at times.
Its all in what your used to I think, not really an issue of true useability but rather human limitations in how we 'stick with what we know'
IBM has many parts, many of which are doing the same thing, few of which even know about the existence of these other groups. Furthermore, many of the IBM folks I've dealt with over the years have a severe case of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. (If it's NIH it can't be good.)
I can easily imagine an AS/400 manager thinking that Linux is his chance to make his machine even more relevant to the world. I can also imagine anyone who sells CICS or IMS or other highly proprietary software seeing Linux as just another enemy. (Someone in this position would be an ally of Java and EJB, however.)
IBM will never be "on our side". Their interests may, in some situations, align with ours. Let's hope there are many such situations.
I strongly recommend "Big Blues, The Unmaking of IBM" by Paul Carroll. It shows how a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and infighting led to the dominance of Microsoft at IBMs expense. You can't read this and not begin to see Microsoft emulating IBM. The book is also fascinating because it shows how a big, scary company can do such a consistent and thorough job of shooting itself in its foot over an extended period of time. Due, primarily, to "not getting it".