ESR and the MindCraft Fiasco

The one and only Eric S. Raymond has submitted his response to the Mind Craft report that we've talked about a bit here lately. This is a good wrap-up type piece which nicely summarizes the flaws with the testing (which range "yeah maybe" to "you gotta be kidding!"). Anyone who thought the tests had any validity should read this. The followingw as written by Slashdot reader, Jargon File Maintainer, Fetchmail Author, Open Source Evangelist, Eric S. Raymond The Mindcraft fiasco

Microsoft's latest FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) tactic may be backfiring.

A 21 April ITWeb story reported results by a benchmarking shop called Mindcraft that supposedly showed NT to be faster than Linux at SMB and Web service. The story also claimed that technical support for tuning the Linux system had been impossible to find.

Previous independent benchmarks (such as "Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX") have found Linux and other Unixes to be dramatically faster and more efficient than NT, and independent observers (beginning with a celebrated InfoWorld article in 1998) have lauded the Linux community's responsiveness to support problems. Linux fans smelled a rat somewhere (uttering responses typfied by "Mindcraft Reality Check"), and amidst the ensuing storm of protest some interesting facts came to light.

1. The benchmark had been paid for by Microsoft. The Mindcraft press release failed to mention this fact.
2. Mindcraft did in fact get a useful answer to its request for help tuning the Linux system. But they did not answer the request for more information, neither did they follow the tuning suggestions given Also, they forged the reply email address to conceal themselves -- the connection was made after the fact by a Usenetter who noticed that the unusual machine configuration described in the request exactly matched that of the test system in the Mindcraft results.
3. Red Hat, the Linux distributor Mindcraft says it asked for help, reports that it got one phone call from them on the installation-help line, which isn't supposed to answer post-installation questions about things like advanced server tuning. Evidently Mindcraft's efforts to get help tuning the system were feeble -- at best incompetent, at worst cynical gestures.
4. An entertainingly-written article by the head of the development team for Samba (one of the key pieces of Linux software involved in the benchmark) described how Mindcraft could have done a better job of tuning. The article revealed that one of Mindcraft's Samba tweaks had the effect of slowing their Linux down quite drastically.
5. Another Usenet article independently pointed out that Mindcraft had deliberately chosen a logging format that imposed a lot of overhead on Apache (the web sever used for the Linux tests).

So far, so sordid -- a fairly standard tale of Microsoft paying to get exactly the FUD it wants from a nominally independent third party. But the story took a strange turn today (22 Mar) when Microsoft spokesperson Ian Hatton effectively admitted [8] that the test had been rigged! "A very highly-tuned NT server" Mr. Hatton said "was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server".

He then attempted to spin the whole episode around by complaining that Microsoft and its PR company had received "malicious and obscene" email from Linux fans and slamming this supposed "unprofessionalism". One wonders if Hatton believes it would be "unprofessional" to address strong language to a burglar caught in the act of nipping the family silver.

In any case, Microsoft's underhanded tactics seem (as with its clumsy "astroturf" campaign against the DOJ lawsuit) likely to come back to haunt it. The trade press had largely greeted the Mindcraft results with yawns and skepticism even before Hatton's admission. And it's hard to see how Microsoft will be able to credibly quote anti-Linux benchmarks in the future after this fiasco.

Comments

Apache Benchmarking

[Matts]

At a large company I'm working with we're trying to prove to the phb's that Linux is a good thing. The mindcraft study set us back a ways. So what did we do? We did our own tests.

Server:
- Hand built by our best hardware guy
- PIII 500 (single CPU)
- Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI Adapter
- 10,000 rpm LRW drive. 1 drive only.
- 100Mb/s network card
- 256Mb PC100 RAM.
- Linux 2.2.6, upgraded from stock Linux-Mandrake box
- Apache 1.3.6, configured for best performance.

No changes to the /proc fs to speed things up. Stock kernel options selected from "make xconfig". Apache was the apache+mod_perl srpm found on redhat/contrib, compiled with no configuration changes. We didn't test NT on this box - we were trying to compare against Mindcraft's results.

Want to know the results so far?

Well, we can get about 2200 requests per second out of that box. The Quad Xeon NT box that mindcraft tested got 3700 requests per second at its maximum rate. We are at very early stages so far, and I think I can squeeze more out of the box by dumping Apache and using thttpd or something else that uses a threaded model. But since this is to be a pure mod_perl box I don't think that's important.

Things to remember:

The mindcraft server had 1Gb of RAM.
The mindcraft server had RAID (RAID/0 I believe).
The mindcraft server had 4 10/100 network cards.

We're so far pretty pleased with our little Linux box... It was a fair bit cheaper than Mindcraft's server....

Content is beside the point.

[Venomous Louse]

The truth or falsehood of the Mindcraft study is irrelevant to its intended audience. The point is to give NT "believers" something to quote in arguments, that's all. It's the Rush Limbaugh Principle. In a disagreement, it's helpful to have official-sounding statistics to back up your point. It doesn't matter where they came from, and it doesn't matter whether they're even remotely accurate. What counts is that somebody "important" (read "well-known") said it in public, which "validates" it. This "validation" isn't about truth. What it means is that the proper forms have been followed, and so it's acceptable to introduce the "evidence" in an argument. What's being offered is not evidence in the conventional sense, but the appearance of evidence, or the outward form of evidence. In poker, what does the four of diamonds mean? It means the four of diamonds. It's pure, disembodied symbol.

Disagreement and debate in our culture (especially on the net) isn't a whole lot less stylized (nor a whole lot less predictable) than Noh drama. You have to play by the rules and observe the forms. The content of the Mindcraft study is arbitrary. The study is a signifier, or token. A yacc parser says, "hey, this token is a function, hey, that one's an operator." The actual content of the token is not significant; what matters is what kind of token it is.

Everybody should learn at least a bonehead popularized minimum of semiotics (which is all I know, obviously :)

While we're at it, let's be honest with ourselves: How many of us are going to check Eric Raymond's facts for ourselves -- even to the minimal extent of clicking on the links he provides? And how many of us who don't check the facts are going to run around repeating them? Quite a few, probably. Dammit, I think Raymond's right on the money with this, and I'm confident that he's done his homework -- but I don't have the time to go about proving it. As far as many of us are concerned, Eric has given us a counter-signifier. Some "good spin" to match against the "bad spin". (That makes it sound dishonest, but IMHO if the "good spin" is factual and accurate, then "good" is a perfectly reasonable thing to call it.)

Think about it.



(Experienced sysadmins are a bit of a special case here. They can judge for themselves. The Limbaugh Principle applies mainly to people who are arguing in an area outside of their field of expertise -- I don't recall who it was who said that "every man is gullible outside his specialty", but it's true even of the best of us.)


"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"