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D.H. Brown Associates Attacks Linux

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the all-of-the-standard-stuff dept.

Scott Stevenson writes "A News.com article describes a study which dings Linux for poor SMP support, access to only 1 or 2GB of memory, and lack of clustering. Of course, it doesn't say anything about NT's uptime issues on a per-machine basis." Also says that hard data isn't available on Linux being reasonably crash proof.

3 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. this is not fud by Stu+Charlton · · Score: 4
    As was discussed when this story was up a few days ago, this study isn't FUD. It makes an honest attempt at comparing commercial Unicies & Linux. D.H. Brown has no particular love for NT, either.

    The fact of the matter is that Linux's SMP support isn't on par with Solaris' (4 CPU's vs. 64), Linux's high-availability clusters aren't on par with *any* commercial UNIX (yet), and Linux's filesystems aren't journaled. (yet)

    Some day (Kernel 2.4/3.0) all these features will probably be there, but let's not start touting vapourware over other solutions. Open source can only combat FUD if the code IS THERE. Right now, it isn't.

    "Use the right tool for the right job" - Linux [on Intel especially] isn't it for sites that need extreme scalability & high availability. (A Sun Ultra 10k, AS/400 parallel cluster or S/390 mainframe is better suited to those environments.)

    Ditto for sites that need to run a transaction processing monitor (like BEA Tuxedo) or a high end application server (like Apple's WebObjects). Though, this is changing... I think BEA is thinking of a Linux port... and WebObjects on Mac OS X Server is pretty sweet.

    [ though not 100% open source, but nothing open source comes even close to Tuxedo or WebObjects in terms of performance, elegence, reusability & developer tools. Perhaps the GNUstep project will adopt the WebObjects framework as another pet project.. ]

    --
    -Stu
  2. SMP "analysis" by Lord+Greyhawk · · Score: 4

    Executive summary pdf link:
    http://www.dhbrown.com/dhbrown/downldbl/linux.pd f

    This contains FUD at higher level than that found in ZDNet.

    Pay attention to how SMP and Linux is "covered" on pages 7-9
    begin quote:
    By boosting the number of locks to somewhere between 10 and 100, the Linux 2.2.5 kernel used by OpenLinux 2.2 should improve its SMP scalability somewhat. But while Linux 2.2 systems can boot on an SMP system with up to eight processors, useful SMP deployment at current levels of granularity has not yet been proven. Little industry-standard or even proprietary benchmark evidence has emerged that demonstrates the performance improvements of
    database or Web server applications running on SMP systems under any Linux distribution. Although Linux has been tested on a variety of SMP systems, booting on eight-processor systems is far
    different from demonstrating improved performance on mixed throughput workloads or multi-threaded database applications.
    :end quote

    Rather than doing RESEARCH and STUDY, they merely report the # of CPUs used in previously published NT and Commercial Unix benchmarks. (They do not print the actual benchmark results here). The number of CPUs used is a virtually useless comparative benchmark. Since they selected two benchmarks where there are no previously published Linux results, they report nothing for Linux. This is used to portray Linux as hopelessly inferior, without actually having to do any work. Check out how they put Linux at 0 CPUs on the graphs. I thought only Microsoft would do something so obviously corrupt and shameless.

    Method: Claim Linux is inferior. Do no benchmarking yourself, but make the lack of data for Linux sound ominously bad. Put in some fancy graphs of useless values selected only for their ability to make Linux look worthless at first glance.

    It is amazing people will pay DHBrown for a report of this quality.

  3. Article link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    Here's the article.